TABLE
OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1BACKGROUDN
TO THE STUDY
1.2
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM
1.3
PURPOSE OF STUDY
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
1.6 SIGNIFICANCE
OF STUDY
1.7 SCOPE OF STUDY
1.9 DEFINITION OF TERMS
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE
REVIEW
2.0 INTRODUCTION
2.2 COST OF CARE IN AN ORPHANAGE
2.3
IMPACT OF ORPHANAGES HOMES ON CHILDREN
2.4
SUPPORT ORGANISATION FOR CHILDREN IN ORPHANAGE HOMES
CHILDREN AND FAMILIES
2.5
CATEGORIES OF INTERVENTIONS TO REDUCE VULNERABILITY
2.6 EMOTIONAL
PROBLEMS AMONG CHILDREN IN ORPHANAGE HOMES
2.7
CHILD PSYCHOLOGIST: CAUSES OF
VULNERABILITY IN CHILDREN AND
BEREAVEMENT
CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY
3.0 METHODOLOGY
3.1 DESIGN OF THE STUDY
3.2 POPULATION OF THE STUDY
3.3 SAMPLE AND SAMPLING TECHNIQUE
3.4
RESEARCH INSTRUMENT
3.5 VALIDATION OF RESEARCH
INSTRUMENTS
3.6 RELIABILITY OF THE RESEARCH INSTRUMENTS
3.7 ADMINISTRATION AND
COLLECTION OF DATA
3.8 STATISTICAL ANALYSIS OF
DATA
CHAPTER FOUR
PRESENTATION, ANALYSIS OF
DATA AND FINDINGS
4.0 INTRODUCTION
4.2 Descriptive
Analyses of Respondents’ Biographic Data
4.4 Summary
of Findings
CHAPTER FIVE
5.0
SUMMARY, CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATION
5.1 Summary
5.2 Discussions
5.3 Conclusion
5.4 Implication for the Research Findings on Orphanage Homes
5.5 Implication for the Research Findings for Future Research
5.6 Recommendations
APPENDIX
CHAPTER
ONE
INTRODUCTION
1.1BACKGROUDN
TO THE STUDY
In
2007, an estimated 145 million children 0 to 17 years old were orphaned, having
lost one or both parents (UNICEF 2008). Many millions of other children can be
described as vulnerable, due to the effects of illness and poverty. There are
many reasons for this situation, including conflict, disease, and accidents.
However,
in recent times, a new and significant cause of the increase in children in
orphanages home and vulnerable children has been the impact of the HIV
pandemic. Worldwide, 15 million children have been orphaned due to AIDS, with
11.6 million orphans due to AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa alone (UNICEF 2008b).
AIDS is also unique in its impact on double orphans, or children who have lost
both parents. If one parent is living with HIV, there is a high likelihood that
the other parent is as well and that a child will lose both parents in a short
period of time. Children who are orphaned are more likely to suffer from
detrimental health and nutritional outcomes; orphaned children are more likely
to be stunted compared to non-orphans. Paternal orphans are also more likely to
have suffered from recurring sickness in the past month compared to
non-orphans. Additionally, caregivers of
double and maternal orphans are less likely to report that the child has been
sick in the last 12 months although maternal orphans are more than twice as
likely to report being treated worse than other members of the household, compared
to non-orphans (UNICEF 2006).
Estimating the number of children in
orphanage homes and vulnerable children depends in large part on how orphans
and vulnerable children are defined and on different methods used to project
future levels of factors that cause children to be orphaned and made
vulnerable, including the course of the HIV and AIDS pandemic.
Orphans tend to be defined as children aged
under 18 who have lost their mother, father or both parents (UNAIDS et al. 2004).
Vulnerable
children can be defined
as children whose safety, well-being or development is at significant risk.
Amongst others, such children can include children orphaned due to AIDS,
children infected with HIV, children caring for terminally sick parents with
AIDS, fostered children, children in poor households which have taken in
orphans, disabled children, street children, children exposed to excessively
hazardous labour, children involved in the sex industry, children affected by
conflict, migrant children and children out of school. The extent to which such
children can be said to be vulnerable will vary from place to place and
community to community.
Children move in and out of various
groups of vulnerability as their life circumstances change. It can be observed
that while orphanhood often imposes a heavy burden on children, not all
children orphaned are needy or poor. Similarly, there are many children who are
not orphans but who are needy or vulnerable. Other factors, such as quality of
parental care, the presence of conflict and families’ needs for children to
work, can also act strongly to affect children’s vulnerability. Many such
factors are not readily quantified or recognized, as a result, common
understandings or definitions of vulnerability are difficult to achieve. While
anecdotal evidence of the experience of orphans and vulnerable children exists,
the extent of the ‘invisible’ causes of vulnerability remains unknown.
Rapid advances in biological
and behavioural research show early childhood as a time of tremendous brain
growth. It is during a child’s first few years that the neural connections that
shape physical, social, cognitive, and emotional competence develop most
rapidly and show the greatest ability to adapt and change. Connections and
abilities formed in early childhood form the foundation of subsequent
development. As a result, providing the right conditions for healthy early
development is likely to be much more effective than treating problems later in
life (centre on the Developing child 2007).
Just as strong foundations
provide the basis for positive and healthy adaptations, weak foundations create
physiological disruptions that can undermine subsequent learning, behaviour,
and lifelong physical and mental health. This biological evidence explains how,
in the absence of nurturing and supportive relationships—the type of
environment in which many orphans and vulnerable Children live— adversity can
create “toxic stress” that undermines all aspects of a child’s subsequent
development, creating significant, physically based, and long-term obstacles to
positive outcomes for these children.
Centre on the Developing child (2010); Shonkoff (2010).
Vulnerability is a
complex concept to define, as is illustrated in local/community definitions of
vulnerability, which often include disabled or destitute children; in policy
and support provision definitions, which list categories of children; and in working
definitions, which are used in various.
A major concern is
that the orphan estimates do not reflect children who are vulnerable but still
living with parents, or children vulnerable due to other causes or in addition
to AIDS. Countries seeking to quantify the current and future burden of orphan
and vulnerable children (OVC) may need to supplement their data on orphans with
information from a situation analysis that covers all vulnerable children.
There is a body of evidence that challenges the assumption that
orphans are the most vulnerable children. Using non-enrolment and
non-attendance rates in schools as proxies for vulnerability, studies by
Ainsworth and Filmer (2002) and Huber and Gould (2003) found that in many
countries poor children (rather than orphans) were most likely not to be
enrolled in or to be out of school. Though generalizations across countries (28
countries in four regions in the Ainsworth and Filmer study) can be challenged,
the link between poverty and vulnerability seems well established, suggesting
that policies to raise enrolment among the poor will also have a positive
impact on disadvantaged OVC. These findings seem to suggest that poverty at the
community level is a main factor driving the conditions in which vulnerable children
find themselves, and that if poverty is addressed, the quality of many
children’s lives would be improved.
The future of any society depends on its ability to foster the
health and well-being of the next generation” (2007), ensuring a strong start
for orphans and vulnerable children is especially” important in societies
facing high levels of HIV infection, where illness and death erode the ability
of the adult generation to nurture children.
A child’s “environment of relationships”
refers to the day-to-day interactions between the child and the people in the
child’s world. This includes family members or caretakers in the home or
institutional setting, as well as the people who interact more broadly with
children, such as individuals and groups within a community, in school, and in
health facilities (Shonkoff 2010). A large body of research documents that
loving, supportive care and secure attachments are critically important for
positive child development. The consistent presence of stable, caring adults is
one of the most, if not the most,
important protective factor in mitigating toxic stress of the kind that many
orphans and vulnerable children(OVC)
face (center on the Developing child 2010; Shonkoff 2010).
Intellectual development of children growing
up in orphanages is thought to be at risk. Because of care in large groups and
poor environments, brain development may become delayed during the formative
period after birth (Chugani et al., 2001), and the lack of challenging stimuli
and stable attachments may impair the intellectual development of institutionalized
children (Gunnar, Bruce, & Grotevant, 2000; Johnson, 2000; Miller, 2005;
Van IJzendoorn & Juffer, 2006).
More than 30 years ago, Dennis (1973)
addressed the question of how large the cognitive delay of children in
orphanages was compared to children
adopted
into families. He studied children who were abandoned immediately after birth
and were reared in children’s homes in Lebanon.
Some of
the children were adopted around their third birthday, and others remained in
children’s homes. Dennis found that at age 11, the average IQ
of the
adopted children was within the range of normally developing children, whereas
the non-adopted orphans were diagnosed as mentally retarded. In a meta-analysis
on six studies, including 253 participants, we found strong evidence for
Dennis’s finding, as the adopted children outperformed their siblings or peers
left behind in terms of their performance on an IQ test with more than one
standard deviation across studies (Van IJzendoorn & Juffer, 2005; Van
IJzendoorn, Juffer, & Klein Poelhuis, 2005).
The intellectual development of
institutionalized children has been studied for more than 60 years. Between
1930 and 1950 the first wave of studies documented that children in orphanages
often showed a low IQ and severe language delays (Crissey, 1937; Durfee &
Wolf, 1933). In later studies
similar
delays were observed in the intellectual as well as the socio motional
domains of development (Ainsworth, 1962; Bowlby, 1952; Ferguson, 1966; Freud
& Burlingham, 1944; Provence & Lipton, 1962; Rheingold, 1956; Schaffer,
1965; Skeels, 1966; Spitz, 1945; Yarrow, 1961).
Children’s
homes have been considered natural experiments into the necessary conditions
for intellectual growth (Kaler & Freeman, 1994; MacLean, 2003; Sloutsky,
1997).
Recent
research keeps showing the continuing negative influence of residential care on
children’s development (Ahmad &Mohamad, 1996; Harden, 2002; Sloutsky, 1997;
Sparling, Dragomir,Ramey, & Florescu, 2005; St. Petersburg-USA Orphanage
Research Team,2005; Vorria et al., 2003; Yagmurlu, Berument, & Celimli,
2005; Zeanah,Smyke, Koga, & Carlson, 2005).
It is
because of the detrimental developmental effects that in many Western countries
the number of orphanages has steadily decreased during the past half a century.
In the past few decades many studies on orphanages have come from developing
countries (Frank, Klass, Earls, & Eisenberg,1996). Nevertheless, children’s
homes still exist in the United States of America (http://www.orphanage.org) as
well as in Europe. Browne et al.(2005) asked health care officials in more than
30 European countries about the number of children under 3 years of age growing
up in children’s homes 342 Merrill-Palmer Quarterly in
2003. They found that throughout Europe 11.2 children per 10,000 resided in
children’s homes, with the Czech Republic having the largest number of young
children in residential care, namely 60 per 10,000. In Africa the number of
children’s homes is currently increasing because of the many AIDS/HIV orphans
who cannot be cared for anymore by members of the extended family (Kodero,
2001; Madhavan, 2004; Nyambedha, Wandibba, & Aagaard-Hansen, 2003).
When
rearing children in orphanages remains or becomes necessary because
alternatives are lacking, the crucial issue is which conditions might
relieve
or decrease the negative impact of institutional care. Depending on the type of
explanation for the intellectual delays, one may have different ideas about
more or less favorable conditions in children’s homes. The maternal deprivation
concept (Bowlby, 1951) states that a stable and continuous attachment
relationship with a sensitive caregiver is essential for
socio emotional
as well as for intellectual development. If this is true, children’s homes with
more sensitive caregivers and smaller groups might be less damaging to
intellectual development. The stimulus deprivation theory (Casler, 1961)
suggests that the lack of physical and social stimuli of any kind may be the
most important cause of intellectual delays, and enriching the orphanage environment would result in
better intellectual development.
Of
course, these theories are not incompatible, and they both may point to
important
components of more favorable children’s home environments. The study on Metera
children’s home in Greece by Vorria and her colleagues (2003) showed the
relevance of caregiver sensitivity for the children’s development. It also
showed the lower sensitivity of caregivers compared to parents and the
discontinuity in care arrangements in a 24-hour residential care setting,
sometimes with toddlers having experienced more than 50 different caregivers.
In an earlier study in the same institution,
Vorria
et al. (1998a, 1998b) showed that siblings were able to derive comfort
from
each other’s presence in the group. In a groundbreaking intervention
study,
Groark, Muhamedrahimov, Palmov, Nikiforova, and McCall (2005) demonstrated that
promoting caregiver sensitivity leads to better socioemotional and cognitive
development of the children involved and a better atmosphere in the groups
consisting of children of differing ages. Caregiver-child ratio might also be
important. Groark and colleagues (2005) managed to decrease the number of
children per caregiver, which promoted children’s development significantly.
Cognitive
stimulation may be another important factor in children’s homes. Morison,
Chisholm, and Ames (1995) showed that with increasing amount of play materials,
developmental delays decreased in children adopted from orphanages (see also
Kaler & Freeman, 1994). Intervention IQ In Orphanages 343 studies
by Hakimi-Manesh, Mojdchi, and Tashakkori (1984) and Hunt, Mohandessi, Ghodssi,
and Akiyama (1976) demonstrated the reversibility of intellectual delays when a
more stimulating and enriched environment was offered. Similar findings emerged
from correlational studies in wellequipped orphanages (Klackenberg, 1956;
Tizard & Rees, 1974). Enhanced cognitive stimulation might have also been the
working ingredient of the Groark et al. (2005) intervention, as their
intervention changes pertained to almost all aspects of group life.
Age of
the children and the duration of their stay in the orphanage may also play a
role in the degree to which group care affects children’s intellectual development.
One would expect that younger entry into the orphanage (Sloutsky, 1997) and a
longer stay (Sloutsky, 1997; Spitz, 1945) would be more detrimental, but the evidence is
equivocal. For example, Vorria et al. (1998) and Kaler and Freeman (1994) did
not find an association between age at entry and intellectual development.
Aboud and colleagues (1991) reported even positive effects: younger children
performed better on cognitive tests. With equivocal and sometimes contrasting
findings, the field of research on the effects of orphanages on intellectual
development is ripe for a quantitative review of the available evidence. In the
current article we report on a series of meta-analyses of the extant empirical
studies published
during
the past seven decades.
The
following hypotheses were tested. First, we addressed the question of whether
children reared in children’s homes were delayed in their intellectual development
compared to children growing up in families and how large this delay on average
would be. Second, we examined some factors that may influence the delays.
Besides some characteristics of the studies involved, such as year of
publication, type of publication, kind of comparison group, and the type of cognitive
test, we explored the influence of sample characteristics.
We also
tested whether gender plays a role in affecting the size of cognitive delays
(Vorria et al. [1998] found that girls suffered less from their stay in a
children’s home) and whether the age of the children was important, not only at entry in the children’s home but also
at time of assessment. Our hypothesis was that earlier entry into group care
would lead to larger delays
later.
Also, the future prospects of the children—whether they were to be adopted or
not—might be relevant because the children to be adopted might
be
relatively less deprived to begin with (Van IJzendoorn & Juffer, 2005). Lastly,
some characteristics of the children’s homes were studied, in particular caregiver-child
ratio and economic level of the country of residence, with the hypothesis that
orphanages in richer countries and homes with more favorable caregiver-child
ratio’s may provide better cognitive stimulation and lead to less cognitive
delay of the children in their care.
1.2 STATEMENT
OF PROBLEM
Poor health and little stimulation
resulting from inadequate care can affect the orphans and vulnerable children’s
ability to think, learn and function effectively. As the HIV pandemic continues
to expand, the impact on children cannot be overstated. Children who are
orphaned by HIV/AIDS become vulnerable to a whole host of dangers in the name
of supporting themselves and their siblings. This paper investigate a summary
of impact of orphanage homes on vulnerable children personality development in
selected primary schools in Lagos state and examines some of the factors
responsible for orphanhood and vulnerability.
1.3
PURPOSE OF STUDY
The purpose
of this study is to share the
practical experiences of humanitarian and government agencies and civil society
organizations in seeking to address the educational rights and needs of orphans
and vulnerable children in orphanage homes. By raising important questions that
emerge from those experiences, it is hoped that practitioners will be able to
consider the relevance of different approaches to their own contexts and needs.
We hope that the lessons learned from these case studies may illuminate the design
of future interventions aimed at assisting orphans and vulnerable children to
realize their right to education and personal development.
By
recording practical experiences of existing interventions, this Research aims to
inform decisions taken by people and organizations working towards he personal
development of children in orphanage homes and goal of universal primary
education from a human rights-based approach. As we have found with previous
books following this format, the information is particularly valued by
education practitioners in formal and non-formal venues, programme managers and
planners, and government policymakers.
Every child
has the right to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of health and
the right to a standard of living adequate for the child’s physical, mental,
spiritual, moral and social development. It is good to recognize that children
have a wide range of needs – including, love, safety, nutrition and play – that
are fundamental in and of themselves, and that only in concert with these can
the right to education enable them to reach their fullest potential. The
inattention to any of these needs puts a child at a disadvantage, limiting his
or her opportunity to grow physically, cognitively, socially and emotionally.
To achieve this, the researcher intends:
1. To investigate the impact of orphanage
home on vulnerable children personal development
2. Explore the influence of caregivers’
attitude on vulnerable children personal development.
3. Determine
if environment factor will have a significant effect on vulnerable children personal
development
4. Determine
if Child factor will significantly influence personal developmental.
5. Determine
if Nutrition will have an effect on vulnerable children personal development.
1.4 RESEARCH QUESTIONS
1. Will orphanage homes have an impact on
vulnerable children personal development?
2. Will caregivers’ attitude influence vulnerable
children personal development?
3. Will
environment factor have a significant effect on vulnerable children personal
development?
4. Will Child
factor influence vulnerable children personal developmental?
5. Will
Nutrition have an effect on vulnerable children personal development.
1.5 RESEARCH HYPOTHESES
The following
research hypotheses will be tested in this study:
1.
The orphanage homes will not have an
impact on vulnerable children personal development
2.
Caregivers’ attitude will not influence
vulnerable children personal development
3.
Environmental factor will not have a
significant effect on vulnerable children personal development
4.
Child factor will not influence vulnerable
children personal development
5.
Nutrition will not affect vulnerable
children personal development
1.6 SIGNIFICANCE
OF STUDY
This study would highlight the impact of
orphanage homes on vulnerable children personal development in selected primary
schools. The findings of this study would be useful for decision-making process
on matters affecting early childhood development programmes
1.7 SCOPE OF STUDY
This study
seeks to investigate the
relationship between orphanage homes and vulnerable children personality
development in primary schools in Yaba Local Government Area of Lagos State.
The variable scope for this study will
include the physical environment, social environment, caregivers’ attitudes
etc.
1.9 DEFINITION OF TERMS
Orphans: tend to be defined as children aged
under 18 who have lost their mother, father or both parents (UNAIDS et al. 2004).
Orphanage
Home: a special or
public institution for the care and protection of orphans.
Vulnerability: which often include disabled or destitute children is defined as
the susceptibility to attack or injury, the state or condition of being weak,
or poorly defended.
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