22% of Australian children are in the care of grandparents, 14% go to kindergarten, 7.8% stay in day care after kindergarten and school, 2.5% attend family-type kindergartens.

One day of kindergarten costs AUD 150-170, half of which is covered by the government.

Babysitting costs AUD 20-30 per hour.

64% of girls and 61% of boys aged 15 to 24 are studying.

80% of people with higher education are employed.

_{* Number of deaths of children under the age of one year per 1000 live births (according to the CIA)}

A place under the Sun

No one will tease a child who is somehow different from other students. Bullying - bullying of any kind - is immediately stopped at school. The classes are mixed every year. Tolerant Australian children, when talking about a newcomer to their parents, will not describe his skin color or physical features.

— Once a new student was transferred to Anton's class. The son described him as "a strong boy in blue jeans". Seeing this child for the first time, I was very surprised - it would be more accurate to describe him as fat.

Whatever you are and whoever you become, society will not judge you. Explaining the meaning of the third B from the list - becoming - teachers say that many circumstances and events influence the formation of each person.

The school library has an entire section dedicated to books for the little ones from the My first look at series. There are picture books here with frightening titles, My Mom Has Cancer, My Pet Died. The essence of difficult situations is explained to children in an accessible language. One of the books, for example, talks about why some children have two dads or two moms.

Families with children definitely go out into the countryside on weekends — hiking in the bush, on the ocean, on a picnic, on a bike trip, in winter they go skiing. One of the leisure activities is to live on a farm.

- There are farms where several families coexist in one large religious community. We somehow went there for the weekend to show the children that people can live in different ways, but no one will look askance at them,” says Elena.

Children talk about past weekends and holidays in kindergarten and school. Kids easily get up in front of the whole group and perform. In elementary school, where they start going from the age of three, oratory is taught.

Already in the second grade they organize public speaking competitions. First, the best speaker from the class is chosen, then from among parallel classes, as a result, the winner must make a speech in front of the whole school.

- Children in front of a large audience make presentations on a certain topic, like real speakers. At these competitions, every time I am amazed at their abilities and once again I understand why the Australians are so relaxed and free: they are sure from childhood that everyone in this country will be carefully listened to and not judged. Therefore, people here are not afraid to express their opinion and do what they really like.

By the way, Australia is one of the most prosperous countries in the world. According to a comprehensive study by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), it ranks second in the world (after Norway) in the Better Life Index.

REVERSE

May 26 is National Repentance Day in Australia. Commemorative ceremonies are held across the country to honor Aboriginal children forcibly separated from their families.

Between 1910 and 1970, the government separated tens of thousands of children from their parents in order to raise them in the spirit of Australian society. In 2008, the country's prime minister, Kevin Rudd, apologized to the indigenous population, acknowledging that "profound grief, suffering and loss" had been inflicted on an entire generation.

Some of the natives managed to obtain moral and financial compensation. Today, Indigenous Australians make up about 3% of the population. In terms of the prevalence of alcoholism, unemployment rates, the number of suicides and cases of domestic violence, they are far ahead of the rest of the inhabitants of Australia, and in terms of life expectancy they lag behind them by 10 years.

_{Photo: Elena Stepanova, Alamy / Legion-Media, Getty Images, iStock, HEMIS / Legion-media}

_{Material published in Vokrug Sveta No. 6, June 2017, partially updated in August 2022}

Daria Karelina

Tags

• children
• education

  7 Australia | RefNews

  Rethinking contemporary and historical adoption experiences will help thousands of children in foster care, says a new report from Australian experts.

  Australia is known as the Land of the Lucky, but the almost 40,000 children in orphanages waiting for a permanent home with loving parents and the many spouses who want to adopt a child are hardly lucky.

  Adoptions in Australia have declined by a staggering 97% over the past 40 years, from nearly 10,000 adoptions in 1971-72 to to just 339 in 2012-13, with almost a third of them made overseas. Other countries also experienced a decline in adoptions, albeit not much compared to Australia.

  Are we really taking better care of children in need? Or is the fact that a large number of them are in shelters a sign that we have preferred ideological and bureaucratic concerns to their interests? A new report from the Australian Women's Forum "Adoption Rethink" shows that the latter is closer to the truth.

  The report examines the decline in adoptions from various perspectives, including the current rise in legal abortions, feminist theory and media coverage. It tracks how this practice, once seen as a natural and obvious solution to the needs of children who are unable to be raised by their own parents, has fallen out of favor in recent decades, and how it affects the growing number of children being raised outside the family.

  Closed adoptions, stolen generations

  At the forefront of this recent story are women who abandoned their children at birth in a time when single mothers were viewed with disapproval. Sometimes these women were under pressure to give up babies without knowing the adoptive parents or expecting to ever see their child again. These women speak of their grief and the wound they have received. Already grown children, who were adopted / adopted under the same “closed” regime, also complained about their painful “quest” to find their biological parents, their full identity. Studies conducted among such people revealed a high level of mental disorders in them.

  Historical errors that lead us to speak of the Stolen Generations (separating Aboriginal children from their families), lost innocents (the "export" of 7,000 children from the UK in the early 20th century) and Lost Australians (hundreds of thousands of Australians who spent their childhoods in orphanages) have also contributed to the bleak notion of adoption over the past ten years.

  At the same time, the population of children who could benefit from adoption has also changed. Early 19In the 1970s, at least half of the adoptions involved the children of young unmarried women. They, themselves almost children, were encouraged, even forced to give away a child they could not raise alone, and instead encouraged to strive to complete their education, find a job and get married. Now those norms have changed with benefits, abortions and birth control pills.

  Is another lost generation on the way?

  Today's picture is very different from the past. Most children in Australia (and similar countries) in need of foster parents have been taken from their biological parents due to physical, sexual or emotional abuse, neglect, and placed in foster homes. The number of these children has doubled over the past decade, however, despite this, it takes an average of four years to adopt a child into a foster family.

  At a time when dramas about foreign adoptions fill the pages of magazines and newspapers, the uncertain future of these children is a growing scandal that calls for urgent action.

  Rethinking Adoption reports that of 39,621 children in foster care in mid-2012, two out of three were in a state of permanent family-to-family transfer for two or more years, with an increasing number of children continually returning to the system . “Thus, children in foster care live in a state of more frequent change and instability, which leads to more complex needs and behaviors.”

  Becky Hope, in her book All In a Day's Work, cited in the report, emphasizes the critical importance of stable, loving care during the earliest periods of a child's life:

  who do not get their basic needs met in reciprocal, loving care, and who are forced to scramble through life on their own, suffer visible devastating effects of brain development even before they are a year old.

  It has also been found that children who experience severe lack of parental attention as infants and are placed in long-term foster care before six months of age are able to generally make more progress than if they are adopted after six months.

  Children need stability to form secure attachments, but guardianship, no matter how well it is done, is temporary in nature. While there has been an increase in permanent guardianship cases in Australia (and similar instruments elsewhere), a recent study in Queensland found that such arrangements "do not provide enough stability for children". On the one hand, the rights of guardians can be challenged by the family of origin, on the other hand, they do not give children the same sense of belonging to the family, unlike adoption.

  Gregory Pike, director of the Center for Bioethics and Culture in Adelaide, also comments on this situation in the report “Rethinking Adoption”: adoptions. The cost to society and government of caring for these children and treating the traumatic consequences of their situation is enormous.

  Adoption: open and closed

  (Ed. With a closed adoption, the adoptive family can keep the fact that the child is not a parent, with an open adoption is not a priority)

  In Australia in 2011-12, 95% of local adoptions were open - this is a continuing upward trend that has covered 80% of adoptions since 1998.

  Although some adoptions did not really take into account the needs of the birth mothers (fathers were usually not in this picture at all) and the child, in the age of open adoptions, every effort is made to respect the rights and feelings of all participants in the “adoption triangle” . In any case, it is the adoptive parents who now suffer their own stigma for being on a side with a dark history, which has negatively impacted a significant number of people.

  There is a tendency to exaggerate this influence.

  Dr. Pike reviewed local and international reports on adoption outcomes for biological mothers, adopted children and parents, including those who belonged to the "closed" age. The literature provides a much more detailed picture than is evident from media reports of people who have gone through negative or unhappy experiences.

  Undoubtedly, some mothers who were forced to give up children suffered, but “a significant amount of uncertainty exists about how common these outcomes were and how they relate to the characteristics of adoption and its process,” Pike says. There is evidence that finding and reuniting with a child has a healing effect.

  Looking at the problems of adopted children, he found the following: Although adopted children represent the largest proportion of patients with mental disorders, the actual proportion of "adoptees" in a society with such problems is very small. Foster children face significant challenges in addition to those typically experienced by children in early childhood and adolescence, however, there is evidence that foster children have incredible resilience and there is official evidence of their ability to "catch up" on various occasions. For some adopted children, their experiences prior to adoption were often difficult and sometimes traumatic, and these experiences were associated with later outcomes. When compared with their peers who remained in the shelters, the "adoptees" had better physical and mental health and better circumstances in education and socialization. The key issues for adopted children were attachment, self-determination, search and recovery.

  Little research has been done on foster parents and their problems.

  Intercountry adoption

  Despite the bad reputation and availability of reproductive technology, it appears that many couples would be happy to adopt if given the option. Frustrated by the barriers to adoption in Australia, they often turn to orphanages in developing countries. Here again they have to wait up to five years.

  Obviously, special care must be taken to ensure that the adoption of a child in another country and culture serves his best interests. Pike says: “In the case of all adoptions, and according to the Hague Convention on Adoption, cross-country adoption should be used only in cases where the biological parents (parent) or relatives do not have the ability or desire to properly care for the child. Only if there are no suitable facilities available to provide ongoing care in the State where the child was born, should ethical inter-country adoption be considered in the best interests of the child. ”

  Tony Abbot's government in Australia has taken steps to expedite these adoptions by creating a new national agency that will be operational by mid-2015 to negotiate adoptions with most countries.

  However, each country has its own special obligations to its children, and those under the care of the state deserve a new plan. Barnados Australia, a leading non-governmental agency for the protection of child survivors of abuse, urges Abbott to set a goal for open adoptions in every state.

  So why delay?

  According to a report by Martin Nary, UK Government Adoption Adviser, important factors include: take him to meetings with his parent or parents while the court decides the future of the child. This represents a shocking mistake with devastating consequences for children and society that will last for decades."

  - Parents are given priority: the needs of the parents, not the rights of the children, are the priority.

  -Loss of sense of urgency when a child is placed in care.

  -Social workers: the need for a balance of social workers who have maturity (not necessarily skill level) and experience in the care and development of children and young workers who may be qualified. Everyone needs to be trained in a real child protection situation and taught to understand the priorities of the child, the need to act immediately, and so on.

  Pike also noted that ideology plays a key role: there are a number of references in Australian sources to an anti-adoptive mentality in some educational institutions "and perhaps among professionals who are key intermediaries", such as employees of government welfare departments. A 2005 government report on foreign adoption noted that attitudes in these departments ranged from "indifference to hostility".

  Feminist ideas about patriarchy and its "dominant prescriptions" are also included. Combined with revelations about previous scandals and forced adoptions, this has shaped public opinion that children should not be separated from their parents.

  This is basically a reasonable principle: the child must be with the parents and reasonable steps must be taken to ensure that they can stay together. However, when a child is neglected or abused, despite the help of relatives and the intervention of the authorities, there must come a time when the best interests of the child dictate the need for his removal from the family. At this point, undoubtedly, efforts should be focused on providing the child with a loving, stable and permanent family.

  Presumably, the principles of open adoption should apply if there is safety for the child and permission from the adoptive parents. Biological parents cannot be completely written off.

  However, this should not be done with adoption either. As Pike says in the conclusion, “There is something about most adoptions that helps them end well. Despite all the complexities and shortcomings of the human experience, the mistakes of the past and the failures of the present, adoption remains a realistic and workable solution.

  ---

  Learn more

  • 
    Treatment miscarriage 6 weeks
  • 
    White dots on baby skin
  • 
    Skin is hot no fever
  • 
    How long does it take to file child support
  • 
    Heartburn at night pregnancy symptom
  • 
    What age walking
  • 
    Excess milk in breast
  • 
    37 week old baby born
  • 
    How long is the average induced labor
  • 
    Do pregnancy discharge smell
  • 
    How much does it cost to have a child in the us