Abstract The sustainable growth of any country is based on children; needless to say children have and will be our future. What if this future is separated from their families and often lives in vulnerable conditions? Millions of children grow up in institutions that put at them at risk of inappropriate development. But of course there is an alternative to this harmful system and as Frederick Douglas said:” it is easier to built strong children than to repair broken men.” As the case study of this research shows alternative childcare in Thailand can be and is effective. Only by promoting awareness and fighting indifference vulnerable children will have a chance to grow up in a loving environment. Introduction According to UN around 8 million children are living in care institutions that deny them individual love and attention. More than 80% are not orphans. They …show more content…
Rene Spitz, a psychoanalyst, undertook research in the 1930s and 1940s on the effects of maternal deprivation and hospitalism. His studies were one of the first to show that that social interactions with other humans are essential for children’s development. Spitz focused on infants who had experienced abrupt, long-term separation from the familiar caregiver, as, for instance, when the mother was sent to prison. He thought that infants in institutions suffered from lack of love and they were missing important parental relationships, which in turn was hurting or even killing them. (Spitz 1945) Another famous psychiatrist William Goldfarb found that many children who had been in institutional care could make only “partial love attachments” in their new homes and he argued that the personality of children in institutions was “congealed at a level of extreme immaturity” and that they showed an “attitude of passivity and emotional apathy”. (Vicedo