Projektování sociálního rodičovství
Designing a Social Parenthood System

Adoption, foster care, and SOS children‘s villages in socialist Czechoslovakia

Summary/Abstract: The author examines how an institutional system of substitute care of minors was built in socialist Czechoslovakia and how it was implemented in practice, including discussions of experts accompanying these processes. He claims the ruling regime was neither striving to destroy the family as the cornerstone of the society, nor trying to place as many children as possible under a collective long-term substitute care system. Since 1945, however, state authorities in cooperation with experts launched a children care project which showed some social engineering elements and in the framework of which politicians and experts created new standards of children care and education. The substitute care system was always pursuing multiple objectives, as had to deal with social, medical, and ideological issues. Many documents of relevant ministries openly declared an intention to educate a “new, socialist individual” in state-supervised institutional facilities in the 1950s, and collective care of children in children’s homes was a standard type of care of biological or so called social orphans at that time. Czechoslovak authorities later made step-by-step modifications of the system to expand the portfolio of substitute care options. Under the pressure of experts in pediatrics, pedagogics, and child psychology, including Jiří Dunovský or Zdeněk Matějček, who initiated a discussion on the “children’s issue” in the 1960s, using results of their research projects to point at psychic ,emotional, and social damage to children in collective facilities, the authorities reacted by facilitating the adoption process, establishing family-type children´s homes, and a de facto restoration of foster care. The experts were participating in these reforms very intensively, pursuing a nuclear family with a traditional role assigned to mother as an ideal. As to “problematic children”, including those of Romany descent, foster care restored by a legal act in 1973 was considered suitable. In the end of his work, the author describes the history of SOS children’s villages in Czechoslovakia, a hybrid form combining collective and foster care, which played a specific role in the substitute care reform. The concept, which was based on Christian education and the central role of mother, was heatedly discussed inthe late 1960s. It was possible to implement it in the liberalized atmosphere of the Prague Spring, thanks mainly to personal efforts of several experts, who established an association, collected a fairly large sum of money, quickly organized the construction of two villages, and arranged their operation. Although the state took them over after the foster care act had come into power, their groundbreaking introduction in the Eastern Bloc still illustrates the fundamental changes of the substitute care system in Czechoslovakia during the forty years of the socialist rule.

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