Charitable Works > Features of our Charitable Works > Homes

Dwelling Homes

The purpose of Dwelling Homes is to protect and attend to the needs of children and adolescents at social risk. They ensue from law 23,849 that refers to the International Convention on the Rights of the Child, in an attempt to guarantee its enforcement. Dwelling Homes differ from Day Care Centers in that Homes temporarily assume a family role.

There, children are offered a home where they can live, learn, play, be cared for and loved, regardless of their individual problem situation. In our Homes children are given the opportunity to become children once again, a status denied to most of them for different reasons.

In order to understand why children are sent to a Dwelling Home, it is important to understand that within the Felices los Niños Foundation, this is a strategy of last resort vis-à-vis the problem situations faced by children and adolescents at social risk.

At the Foundation we care very much about working together with the children's families

What do we mean by children at social risk?

They are children whose rights are underrated, ignored, discredited, and who are the victims of different forms of violence, either through action or omission

• Physical or emotional violence
• Sexual abuse
• Child labor
• Mendicity
• Pseudo abandonment
• Neglect

The Foundation is involved in various programs to promote Children’s Rights and to prevent risk situations, e.g.

1. Street Programs, in which street operators and professionals try to rescue children from the perils of the street and to restore family bonds (whenever possible) and return them to school or to Day Care Centers that may provide family support. That is the work of the San Roque Mobile Team.
2. Day Care or School Programs strive to work together with institutions and the community to help families play their supportive role and thus prevent risk situations in children by offering them education, love and containment.

Despite the adoption of every possible strategy, certain problem situations that are particularly complex require the child’s separation from his/her family, the intervention of the courts and the child’s admission to a Home. There, children are “protected” while new strategies to solve the child’s specific situation are devised.

The objectives of the Homes may be classified into two major areas:

Work aimed at the children’s development, their integration with the institution and the community to which that institution belongs, as well as the development of their personality:

• Helping the child find a place where he/she can develop fully, i.e. receive clothing, food, education, affection, and health care.
• Building on the children’s capabilities.
• Promoting a family atmosphere through the implementation of Don Bosco’s Preventive System in which children may develop.
• Helping children to engage in the different community and educational institutions, participating in activities outside the Home, just like other children of their age.

Child identity and rapport to the biological family or to relatives that act as significant role models.

• Strengthening bonds between siblings living in the Home.
• Collecting information that may help reconstruct the identity of each child.
• Restoring bonds with the child’s biological family.
• Finding adults who may be significant role models for those children who cannot relate to their biological family.

Mode of intervention: Children are under the permanent care of educators - care providers who work jointly with an interdisciplinary team of professionals belonging to the institution and other professionals of the community. A permanent connection with the courts is established in order to carry out joint follow up of the different cases.

Admission: When a child is admitted to the institution he/she must go through an adaptation period during which the child is given emotional containment in an effort to have him/her slowly return to his/her role as a “child”. That is, the child starts to recover his/her basic rights to food, lodging, cleanliness, health and adult care.

Time of stay at the institution: During the child’s stay at the Home, steps are taken towards:

• Integrating the child into the school system.
• Ensuring health control, vaccination, dental health care and anything the child may need to be “protected”.
• Engaging in community activities, such as municipal workshops, sports, etc.
• Participating in local Parish activities, religious instruction, mission work.

At the same time, efforts are made to reconstruct the child’s history and identity:

• By looking for the child’s biological family –mother, father, aunts, uncles, grandparents. We try to get an in-depth insight of the reasons for the child’s admission to the Home.
• By trying to find the child’s I.D., and birth certificate. If the family does not have such documents, the necessary steps are taken to obtain them.
• By evaluating the reestablishment of ties with the biological family and the prospects of being discharged from the Home.
• Should there be no possibility for the child to return to his/her family, we look for relatives who may act as positive role models to accompany the child during his/her development (godparents).

Discharge::

• If the family is emotionally and economically prepared to provide the child with a home.
• If the Juvenile Court decides that the child is suitable for adoption, he/she is gradually introduced to the adopting family.
• If neither of the above is possible, a study and work project is designed for the future of the child.

For all those who work with children in the Foundation, children represent the “present”. Homes therefore constitute a daily commitment with each child, from the very moment he/she is admitted to the institution until the moment of discharge.

A “Home” is the place where one can find a family, breakfast with fresh bread, a warm bed, where joys and sorrows are shared, where birthdays are celebrated for the first time, where one can wear a clean school uniform and hope for Christmas...

Lic. María Clara Tucci Ros

A tradition at Felices los Niños Foundation's Dwelling Homes:
"Good Night" Don Bosco style

Angel of God, my Guardian dear, to whom His love commits me here...

Saint John Bosco, the great teacher of youth, had a special gift for getting educational results by means of apparently very simple resources. One of these are the famous “Good Nights”. These were extremely brief spiritual send-offs before bed time, which Don Bosco gave his boys, related to Christian life or to some aspect or community life at the home. Thousands of “Good Nights” by Don Bosco are remembered, which he delivered with great pedagogical sense adjusted to the children's life with both impact and charme.

Don Bosco was deeply aware of human psychology, he knew there are some moments of the day in which the heart is more receptive. Both the first and the last instants of each day are the most important ones, not just for children, but also for adults. It is important to start the day with a good thought. Beginning the day with a dose of bad radio news is quite different from assimilating a positive idea. Something similar happens at the last moment of the day, when we close the working day, turn off the lights and confine ourselves in our inside. Thoughts pondered just before sleeping are better assimilated by our heart. This is the reason why one should not watch television immediately before going to sleep, but rather read for a while, as short as it may be, and above all, make an examination of conscience and a prayer.

Both in Salesian centers and in Felices los Niños this “Good Night” tradition goes on, being adapted to circumstances of life. Thus the “Good Mornings” or the “Good Afternoons” were introduced with the same brief, incisive, and agile formulation. Why not adapt this instant to our own home? Sometimes we have no time to be with our children. Making the most of bedding time, day by day, year after year, seeing the day off with some good thought is a good school of life.

Day Care Centers

According to public policies, Day Care Centers or Children’s Houses are places intended to provide containment to children between 6 and 14 with the objective of strengthening the family through the child’s integral care.

Non governmental organizations working for the wellbeing of "children in need" devise projects committed to action and which are associated to the insights and the struggle of those who continue defending human rights and, especially, the rights of children around the world. A Day Care Center results from the effort of a team committed to the "cause of children".

The project conceptualizes the objectives, interaction and working philosophy that make up an institutional mission that attempts at responding to certain basic needs by integrally attending to children. That mission takes into account the quality of personal relations, emotional development and family self-esteem and calls for family participation.

Maximal smiles and Peace in the heart: The kids at Máximo Paz.

Children are grouped in three or four cycles of 20 to 25 children each, depending on their ages and schooling. They go to school from Monday to Friday out of school hours while on Saturday mornings workshops are organized to integrate cycles and shifts until after lunch. On weekdays, there are two shifts for lunch; children attending school in the morning have breakfast, while those who go to school in the afternoon have an afternoon snack. The remaining time is devoted to scheduled group activities. The guiding principle is for children to be educated and to build lasting bonds. Creativity is promoted by making use of every communication opportunity to help the child realize making something new for its own use is possible.

The institution envisages two working options: A Project on Remedial Teaching and a Project on Alternative Activities.

Remedial Teaching. This Workshop offers a space for various learning experiences related to the School. Group leaders carry out two types of activities with the children:

• Remedial Teaching Activities: a continuation of the work done at school, namely, "doing the homework". This implies respecting the children’s maturational and evolutionary times. The Day Center is a complement to the school and therefore tries to preserve the consistency we understand learning must have in shaping children’s thinking. However, in practice, we occasionally find ourselves performing a supplementary role.
• Complementary Activities: these are learning activities aimed at stimulating creativity, expression and the resolution of different situations. Learning difficulties are seen as obstacles such activities strive to overcome.

Consequently, in learning reading and writing skills, complementary activities like reading books, newspapers and magazines, copying signs, poems and quizzes, or writing songs, help children to read with comprehension and expression and to write correctly, without spelling mistakes.

Alternative Activities. A project aimed at stimulating thought, creativity, freedom and play. The proposed activities must create models of how to attain satisfaction, build self-esteem and be accountable for one’s acts. Learning is not graded but rather acknowledged through achievements while living together as a group: mutual respect, accepting the differences, tolerating certain degree of frustration, turning individual competition into cooperation and group solidarity. The rules and regulations of a Day Center have been designed with the purpose of educating, organizing, teaching how to think and build values.

Socializing outings serve several objectives: to relate to the environment (sports facilities, parks, walks around the neighborhood), to learn to value themselves as persons and to widen their horizons. Many children have never seen the Obelisk, or visited Congress, or the Zoo: they have never been to the theatre, to la Ciudad de los Niños (a recreational park with a miniature city inside), the Parque de la Costa (park offering roller coasters and other games and entertainment). Preparations for an outing include a group discussion on safety and security issues. On their return, the children share their experience through artistic expression, dance, drama, etc. as a way of incorporating it to their world. Teachers, mothers and assistants accompany the children on such outings.

Other activities are geared to acquire habits of personal, oral and body hygiene, as well as health and dental care.

Lic. Beatriz Ferreyra

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