Yes, you read that correctly. So why are they there?

Imagine as a parent living in poverty, unable to properly feed and house your children, working multiple jobs, or having no work at all, and walking past facilities every day where children are being educated and fed. What would you do?

In many countries, parents are left believing that they can bring their child home anytime they want to, seeing it more as a school than an orphanage. There are many cases where a parent will return to find their child has been adopted to an overseas family and no contact is allowed and/or has been cut off.

In addition to this heartbreaking loss there are the long term effects on both child and parent. For the parent, they are traumatizing enough, but for the child, they have to do with developmental and/or behavioral issues. They include but are not limited to, attention deficits, language or reading skills, malnutrition, neglect, and abuse. For obvious reasons, these are very likely long term and life changing effects.

In 2005 J.K. Rowling - author of the Harry Potter books - after witnessing children suffering in orphanages founded Lumos with the goal to return children living in orphanages to their families or relative care. Since Lumos was founded they have helped more than 17,000 children make this transition to “home”. Most of their work in is done Eastern Europe. As of 2017, there was a reported two-thirds reduction of the number of children living in Bulgarian orphanages and the government is on track to close them all by 2020.

To find out more about Lumos and donate to their cause, visit: https://www.wearelumos.org/what-we-do/

The following is a message by J. K. Rowling about the Lumos mission and goals.

ADDITIONAL READING

Excerpt from: Forbes Apr 20, 2010, 05:00pm

It's The Orphanages, Stupid!

By Maia Szalavitz

https://www.forbes.com/2010/04/20/russia-orphanage-adopt-children-opinions-columnists-medialand.html#7463f6c321e6

Research on the dangers of institutional care for young children dates back to the 1940s. For as long as they have existed, orphanages have always had alarmingly high death rates. From the early 20th century onwards, this was blamed on contagious disease–and so, attempts were made to keep orphanages sterile, to isolate children from each other by doing things like hanging sterilized sheets between their cribs.

But Austrian psychoanalyst and physician Rene Spitz proposed an alternate theory. He thought that infants in institutions suffered from lack of love–that they were missing important parental relationships, which in turn was hurting or even killing them.

To test his theory, he compared a group of infants raised in isolated hospital cribs with those raised in a prison by their own incarcerated mothers. If the germs from being locked up with lots of people were the problem, both groups of infants should have done equally poorly. In fact, the hospitalized kids should have done better, given the attempts made at imposing sterile conditions. If love mattered, however, the prisoners’ kids should prevail.

Love won: 37% of the infants kept in the bleak hospital ward died, but there were no deaths at all amongst the infants raised in the prison. The incarcerated babies grew more quickly, were larger and did better in every way Spitz could measure. The orphans who managed to survive the hospital, in contrast, were more likely to contract all types of illnesses. They were scrawny and showed obvious psychological, cognitive and behavioral problems.