(CZ) Životní jistota, začlenění a perspektiva dětí v domově rodinného typu
(EN) Life Security, Adaptation and Perspectives of Children Brought Up in the Children’s Home of the Family Type

The feeling of security and safety is one of the most important needs of the child. The degree and quality of the satisfaction of this need determines the character of the child’s development. The children living permanently or for a long time without their own family must be given some substitute for family care; one of such substitutes is the Children’s Home of the family type. This type of Home was built in our country in 1966, independently of the situation in Europe, by Kučera in the Kašperské Hory, in an effort to find a new solution to the problem of child care in children’s homes. The author had been asked to give an assessment of the social situation of the children as well as of the social activities of the institute, and to put forward proposals for improving the general situation and removing the shortcomings. In carrying out this task the author proceeded from analysing and evaluating the objective social status of the children. In order to include the children’s subjective status in his assessment as well, the author made up a scale of values based on his former works on the social position of children in various forms of care both in and away from their families and using a numerical index to express the level of the children’s life security, the place in their life environment and the ideas about their future. Thirty-two children were examined, i. e. all the children who had been in the children’s home of the family type continuously since its reconstruction, i. e. for nearly five years. By comparing the results of a similar examination of children from traditional children’s homes and from good families the author found that the level of broader and narrower life security, place in life and adaptation of the children from the family-type home was, surprisingly, as low as that of the children from the home of the traditional type where they had been living since their birth or very early childhood. Similarly, the two groups of children showed a somewhat higher degree of adaptation to their own families, even though these families were problematic or did not exist at all or existed only in the children’s minds. This circumstance proved to be the most serious cause of the disintegration of life securities and of the sense of belonging to the environment in which the children lived. Another important result of the author’s investigation was the fact that the index of the third area of subjective social status of children from the family-type home, i. e. the area of life perspectives, had the highest values in comparison with the other two groups. This fact must be regarded as a very positive result of the educational efforts in the family-type home in the Kašperské Hory and it also provides the key for the path to be followed in the further development of child care in this institute, especially in the sense of using the feeling for future security to increase the feeling of present-day life security. The author, by trying to lay down in points and percentages the level of the three areas which he considered to represent the subjective social status of children, was also able to judge the suitability of the children for this form of family care substitute. Thus he found that 24 children out of the 32 were suitable for this type of care. Only one half of the twenty-four children, however, were well adapted, the other half fluctuating between a fictional family and dissatisfaction in the institute. Eight children did not fit in this home at all because they were in permanent contact with their own families seeing support and life security in them. As to the future of the institute a number of measures have been proposed to reinforce the significance of the children’s home in the comprehensive care for the children in the home. The children who do not belong to this type of home should be transferred to boarding homes or returned to their families. The analysis and evaluation of the objective and subjective social status of the children in the Kašperské Hory Children’s Home allowed the author to suggest further suitable measures for the solution of undesirable variations or shortcomings, especially as regards concrete corrective measures in the field of social law and psychological pedagogy for each child separately and also for the institute as a whole. And then, together with the head of the institute to try and make a contribution to the further development of child care in this type of institution, which is only in its initial stage.