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Ekaterina Prudova
St. Petersburg State Institute of Psychology and Social Work Faculty of Applied Psychology (2 year master's program)
SOCIAL PRACTICES OF DEALING WITH MULTIPROBLEM FAMILIES IN RUSSIA
Annotation:
This article concerns the main challenges of multi-problem families in Russia, especially families with disabled children. It has also considered urgent issues of the social policy system, examples of the latest methods of work from the social services' experience and determined the role of non-commercial organizations supporting families with disabled children.
Аннотация:
В данной статье рассматриваются основные сложности мультипроблемных семей в России, в частности - семей с детьми-инвалидами. Представлены актуальные вопросы государственной системы в области социальной политики, рассмотрены примеры одних из самых современных методов работы из практики социальных служб и выделена роль некоммерческих организаций в поддержке семей с детьми-инвалидами.
Keywords:
multi-problem families, disabled children, social support, social policy, social service experience, social network, social expedition, NGO
Ключевые слова:
мультипроблемные семьи, социальная политика, дети-инвалиды, социальная поддержка, социальная экспедиция, некоммерческие организации
The term of a multi-problem family can be considered from the common or certain point of view. In the narrow sense of this notion, a multi-problem family is the one that cannot efficiently solve tasks of development at any stage of the family's life cycle.
In the wide sense of this notion, problem families include the following
types:
■ dysfunctional family is the one that performs its basic family functions
badly or does not perform them at all, and
■ unfavorable family is the one that has a low state of psychological comfort
in the family [6, p. 207].
Thus, problem families are those that have functional impairment and low potential for solving development tasks at any stage of their life cycle. There are the following types of problem families:
We'd like a family with a disabled child;
a family with bad communication in it;
a family that is going to get divorced;
a single-parent family;
a family of alcoholics;
to consider one of the problem families more detailed, namely - a family with a disabled child. Birth of a disabled child can often become a destructive factor that breaks the family's usual functioning. This transformation more often leads to breakdown of the married couple's subsystem from the father when he leaves the family because of neuropsychic and physical overload. But the child's sickness can have an opposite role of the factor stabilizing the family system because the married couple neither sorts out its relations nor lays claims to each other, but it is focused on the child's treatment and upbringing [1].
A family with a disabled child becomes a problem one if the child's sickness is the only stabilizer salvaging the marriage. The real problems in the family will be concealed by the steep care of the child. The parents' accumulated but concealed emotional annoyance can appear unexpectedly: scandals without a serious reason, depression, finding relief in different pseudoscientific doctrines and religion by one of the parents, etc.
In general there are three types of reaction for a disabled child's birth:
1. Passive reaction: misunderstanding of the given problem, the feeling of parents' broken hopes, problem denial.
2. Hyperactive reaction: attempt to find the most famous doctors, latest and expensive medicines, with frequent changes in treatment.
3. Average well-minded reaction: consistent fulfillment of orders of doctors, psychologists and other specialists. Families of the third type of reaction have the most efficient cooperation with social workers.
Some statistics:
■ as of July 2015 14 747 disabled children live in St. Petersburg [9].
■ The largest percent among such families is single-parent households
■ From 15% till 30% of couples get divorced after a disabled child's birth [2; 6].
■ Despite of the difficulties, families with the disabled children have the following educational opportunities:
■ Children with not very expressed abnormal physical and mental development study in special boarding schools;
■ Children with deeper psychosomatic disorders live in boarding schools constantly.
A special medical and pedagogic commission select children for such schools.
There is quite a standard row of problems of the system of government support, actual for the majority of families with disabled children. The first one is financial difficulties. The law provides monthly care payments for disabled children up to 18 years old [9]. The problem is in small allowance (5 311,00 roubles) and difficulty of its execution, as a lot of documents should be submitted by parents to the authorities. However 50% discount for municipal housing is also provided for such families as an additional support and indexation of monthly allowance is planned for 2016 [7].
Work searching process is also difficult for parents of a disabled child. One of the parents (guardian) of a disabled child has the right to work part-time [4]. The problem is that it is hard to find such a work as companies are not interested to employ people with such requirements.
Provision with the required devices is the next problem disabled children are faced with. Usually disabled people are provided with the necessary devices, typhlo-, surdo- and other tools required for social adaptation at the expense of the government [5]. The problem is that a user can be provided with a tool only from the approved list pursuant to the local legislation, and, as a rule, these are old-fashioned or inconvenient models. Now people have started resolving this problem via Internet, signing and submitting online petitions to the appropriate officials.
High cost of commercial childcare services. According to the statistics, just five families out of five hundred can hire a paid nurse for a child. Parents seldom use third person services because, firstly, it's hard to find a person who can be entrusted to take care of disabled children. Secondly, the market cost of disabled childcare services can exceed the amount earned by mothers of disabled children. The good news is that these problems are being solved now with the help of public organizations and charity foundations.
Lack of awareness of the population. Parents of disabled children don't often know about kinds of social services available for them. According to the polling data just 16,7 % of parents answered that they knew the law about the disabled people social protection. The main part of pollees (83,3 %) admitted their unawareness.49,2 % of pollees mentioned their friends and families as the main information source [3, p. 87].
The good news is that the state social service institutions continue implementing new methods and technologies in their work for families support. Social expedition is an example of one of such methods. This is a group of experts, organized on the basis of state social service institutions, with the involvement of NGO's. As a rule, this expedition includes lawyers, psychologists and social workers. The task of this social service is to visit hard-to-reach districts with an underdeveloped infrastructure of social service provision. They also have to visit families registered as "potentially risky". The purpose of the expedition is to check the situation of children in registered families; to provide possible psychological, legal or other assistance; to render financial assistance to low-income families; to inform families about available social services, especially in suburbs.
Another method, becoming more and more popular in Russia is a work with networks of social contacts. This method works well with socially
disadvantaged children and their families via building the network of a child's social surrounding.
The main goals of a work with network of social contacts is the reduction in the term of children's stay in government institutions, prevention of children from living out of their families; decrease of the level of social stress, anxiety or aggression in families in difficult life situation. Usually it is used to target groups of children and teenagers in a difficult life situation.
The main point of the method is that a social worker together with a child or a teenager makes a «network card» of the surrounding. Graphically it will be a set of dots joined with lines. The dots represent people - family, relatives, school, friends, and neighbors.
The network card allows finding out the relations of a child or a teenager about people surrounding them. It allows the client finding the support resources that he or she already has in his/her social surrounding. Understanding the importance of each person in his/her surrounding allows an individual to build the correct scheme of relations with other people. The social worker can help an individual by asking the following questions:
■ Which of your relatives is concerned with your life?
■ Which of your family members has a positive influence on you?
■ Which of your friends is ready to help you and listen to you if you are in a difficult situation?
■ Do you consider it right, that the social service interferes in your life and what do you think about its actions? etc.
Along with the state support of multi-problem families and families having disabled children, there is a number of social, NGOs and voluntary organizations, also providing a great help to those families. A lot of new people join voluntary organizations every day. Over 50 public non-commercial organizations cooperate with state social care authorities only in St. Petersburg.
The main goals of the public non-commercial associations is arrangement of useful day-time occupation for youth from families in difficult life situation, including children with serious mental development disorders;
■ social and labour adaptation of young people, vocational guidance, employment assistance, arrangement of part-time occupation of teenagers of 14-18 years old during non-study time;
■ arrangement and holding of sport and creative festivals;
■ conducting training, seminars and conferences for parents and specialists;
■ creation of methodological, information and game video films, social commercials, educational materials;
■ constant search for sponsors for providing material assistance for medical procedures, if needed, and expensive medicine to families with seriously ill children.
References:
1. Gonshtein M.I. Psychological characteristics of families with a disabled child. [Electronic resource] // Social network of educational specialists. Available at: http://nsportal.ru/blog/detskii-sad/all/2015/12/iq/psihologi-cheskie-osobennosti-semi-imeyushchey-rebenka-s-ovz (accessed 25.01.2016)
2. Kolchina A., Savostyanova E. Fathers of disabled children: painful issues. [Electronic resource] // Orthodox portal about charity and social activities. Available at: https://www.miloserdie.ru/article/papy-detej-invalidov-bolnye-voprosy/ (accessed 20.01.2016)
3. Kulagina E.V. Domestic work to care for children with disabilities // Journal of Social Policy Studies. 2004. Vol.2. P. 79-90.
4. Labor Code of the Russian Federation. The federal law of the Russian Federation of December 30, 2001 no. 197-FZ, version dd. December 30, 2015, - article 93.
5. On Social Protection of Disabled Persons in the Russian Federation. The federal law of the Russian Federation of November 24, 1995 no. 181-FZ // Russian Newspaper. 1995. 24 nov. Available at: http://www.rg.ru/1995/ 11/24/invalidy-dok.html (accessed 20.01.2016)
6. Posysoev N.N. The basics of family psychology and family counseling. M.: Vlados-press, 2004. 328 p.
7. Social Code of St. Petersburg. The law of St. Petersburg of November 22, 2011 no. 728-132, chapter 33.
8. Sorokin V.M. The meaning and dynamics of parents' reaction to the fact of having a child with developmental disabilities // Orenburg University Gazette. 2011. Vol. 5 (124). P. 23-26.
9. Social support of families having disabled children. [Electronic resource] // Administration of St. Petersburg. Available at: http://gov.spb.ru/helper/social/family/detyinvalidi 2011/ (accessed 27.01.2016)
