Ginangs of Manila
Foster parents for children in need
Home before home
Current local foster parent count insufficient for gov’t drive to “deinstitutionalize” child care
Nicole-Anne C. Lagrimas
Paul John V. Domalaon
Foster care—temporary one-on-one, family care for neglected children—is the government’s dream alternative to understaffed orphanages. There just aren’t enough foster parents to fill the gaps.
IN 1990, Honoria Duque had three children. Before that year ended, she had one more. Not long after that, another child came. And another. By 2017, she has had about 20 children, and it’s unlikely that the count will stop there.
The catch: of that number, only four came from her womb. The rest, though she treated them as her own and “perhaps even more,” were only hers temporarily.
Duque, called Nanay Onang by her neighbors and fellows, has been a foster parent for 27 years. She was the first foster parent to be licensed in the Parenting Foundation of the Philippines (PFP), a child placement agency headquartered in a residential subdivision in Muntinlupa, which now has a pool of 50 active foster families.
Nanay Onang has fostered 16 children in nearly 30 years. “Di pa rin marami (Not too many),” she noted.
Honoria Duque. Photo by Nicole-Anne Lagrimas
The former daycare teacher, now 73, seems a natural among children—she paused a few times during the interview to mind the kids running around the agency’s office: “Baka ka malaglag” (You might fall), she told a pre-school-aged boy clumsily going down the stairs. But she she didn’t always want to be a foster parent.
She already had children of her own and did not favor having another one to care for, she said. Her change of heart came quickly enough, though, in the form of her first charge: an infant with a lump on his head, abandoned by his parents at the hospital after birth.
“Naawa ako sa bata,” she recalled. “May nanay pala na ganun...’Yung pagmamahal ng nanay, gusto kong punuan, gusto kong ibigay sa kanya. Kaya tuwing may bata na napunta, gusto ko ang best ko ibibigay.” (I pitied the child—Apparently there were mothers like that. I wanted to give the love that his mother couldn’t; that’s why every time a child arrives, I want to give [them] my best.)
Nanay Onang is one of 1,048 active foster parents licensed by the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) across the country, a number which turns out to be nowhere near enough. And Nanay Onang knows it, too—”Kailangan talagang may advocacy (There really has to be an advocacy),” she said, in order to encourage more Filipinos to consider foster care.
Government data reveals only 44 children are up for foster care, or “a planned temporary substitute parental care to a neglected child by a foster parent,” as of writing, but as the state’s long-term vision for child care is “deinstitutionalization,” or the gradual transfer of all children placed in “residential facilities”—orphanages and government institutions—to actual family settings in preparation for eventual adoption or reunification with birth families, a little more than a thousand foster parents is not going to be sufficient.
Jean Cadelina of the DSWD adoption office calls deinstitutionalization their dream.
The now 42-year-old Child and Youth Welfare Code stipulates that “unless absolutely necessary,” no child below the age of nine should be placed in an institution. Though impermanent, foster care is a unanimously preferred alternative to institutional care, or housing children in government facilities, hence the drive to deinstitutionalization. More broadly known as group care, this living condition for young children refers to homes where non-related children from multiple families live with non-related caregivers.
Jean Cadelina, DSWD Bureau of Protective Services. Photo by Paul John V. Domalaon
Foster care, in simple terms, “is giving children in orphanages a chance to grow in a family setup,” said Cadelina.
“Kasi pag nasa residential facility siya, limited ang opportunity to grow (When [a child] is in a residential facility, they have limited opportunities to grow),” she added, citing understaffing in government institutions, leading to minimal care, often in eight- or ten-to-one child-to-caregiver ratios. Care in this context might only mean changing diapers, bereft of one-on-one stimulation that only a focused parent can give.
However, a 2014 study by American researchers which tracked the wellbeing of more than 1,300 children in institutional care and another 1,400 in foster care in Cambodia, India, Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania revealed that children in out-of-home conditions can do as well as children in foster care. The difference in the children’s physical and mental improvement were statistically insignificant.
Given the current global mood that institutional care adversely affects children, this study proved a contrary (and unpopular) point to disagreement from believers of deinstitutionalization. The study’s lead author Kathryn Whetten said that the complete removal of institutional care wouldn’t have a “magical” effect on children’s welfare.
Cadelina, like many others, would disagree. But as it is, she reported a difficulty among social workers to recruit foster parents for cultural reasons: what seems to be a mild aversion to caring for children who are unrelated is only reversed by a “motivation to help,” she said, echoing a sentiment common among both social workers and foster parents.
“That’s why we are continuously advocating and educating foster care and promoting it to different barangays and provinces all over the Philippines,” said Alleen Verdan, a social worker at PFP. They strive to conduct foster care orientations every month, and occasionally personally visit barangays to spread awareness on foster care.
Not to be confused with adoption, foster care is temporary care, lasting from a few months to several years, depending on the case.
Foster parents are not entitled to a lifetime with the children they shelter and care for like their own; nor are they compensated financially apart from a monthly subsidy which is exclusively for the foster child’s everyday needs. But the Foster Care Act of 2012 ensures an additional tax exemption of P25,000 for each dependent (not more than four), including the foster child, of every foster parent, as well as support care services such as trainings and livelihood assistance sponsored by the DSWD.
Other than placing incentives, the law has also reportedly made the process of application for licensing easier, said Verdan. Prior to the law’s enactment, the DSWD only provided guidelines to foster care, and each of the six child placement agencies had relatively free rein as far as their processes were concerned.
Process of becoming a foster parent
According to Memo Circular No. 23 Series of 2014 or the Guidelines on Foster Care Services
1. Recruitment and development
2. Home Study Report
3. Issuance of license
Interested individuals are oriented by social workers from the Department of Social Welfare and Development or child placing agencies through a forum or one-to-one workshop. They then fill up application form to be assessed by the agencies.
A background check, through a planned home visit, of the interested applicant and his or her family is conducted by a social worker. A home study report is then submitted to the DSWD regional office for processing.
Upon receiving the home study report, the regional field office may immediately issue a foster care license to the applicant. A renewable license shall be valid for three years.
4. Child Study Report
5. Matching
Another set of report, now to determine the needs of a child eligible for foster care, is made by the same social worker up for a matching process.
After a series of evaluation, a licensed foster parent is matched with a children in need of foster care. agency will be monitoring the families and the children until their reunification to their biological parents or upon adoption.
On the day of the interview, Nanay Onang visited the agency headquarters to pick up her foster kids’—two at the moment—monthly supply of diapers, milk and toiletries and half of the P4,000 subsidy provided by the DSWD.
With her are her fellow foster parents from the same community in Taguig, and each of them claimed to be motivated by the same desire to help children in need that steered Nanay Onang out of her initial disinterest almost three decades ago.
Social workers agreed. Verdan, who is in directly in charge of PFP’s foster care program, said childless couples, empty nesters and couples with growing kids alike apply for a license for reasons ranging from charity to character-building for young children, but the underlying motive is an “interest in caring.”
More, Jalil Usman of CRIBS Foundation, Inc., the pioneer foster care program in the country, noted that foster families usually found one-on-one care “more meaningful” than one-time outreach activities.
But foster care, at its core, proves to be the same as caring for one’s own children. The foster parents at the agency traded stories—how they disciplined children out of their negative habits likely developed during their time in residential facilities, such as stealing or hitting people; rushing them to the hospital when they got sick; bringing them to and from school; and watching them grow.
Melba Pollo, one of Nanay Onang’s neighbors and fellow foster parents, said her whole family was in on caring for their foster child, who has now been with them for the last two years. She said she told her children, “Love natin yang baby na yan, wala na yang mga magulang. Tayo na ang magmamahal sa kaniya (We love that baby; they no longer have parents. We are now the ones who will love them).”
Nanay Onang’s maternal instincts also kicked in when a young foster child of hers accidentally toppled a food vendor’s products, sending the vendor running after the child with an itak; Nanay Onang arrived at the scene just in time, placing her body as a shield between the enraged woman and her charge, whom she told to “run home.” The skirmish was settled—Nanay Onang paid for the wasted food.
Five of six DSWD-accredited child placing agencies with foster care services are concentrated in the Nation Capital Region, with one found in Laguna.
But because foster care is temporary, the stories all led, one way or another, to the inevitability of separation. And some separations were simply worse than others.
One foster parent, Vilma, simply said, “Pag umaalis, masakit dito (It hurts when they leave),” gesturing to her heart.
The departure, however, was something they had always known would come and thus had to be trained for, said Usman of CRIBS Foundation.
The common coping mechanism after a child leaves: foster another one. It wouldn’t be the same, agreed all the parents interviewed, but having a new child to mind would take their minds off of the one who had just left.
This is what Amanda Rupillo, 57, did. She is with the Kaisahang Buhay Foundation (KBF), another child placement agency, and was licensed in 1995. She wasn’t entirely sure just how many children she has fostered, but estimated the count to be around 23, one of whom is in her arms as they waited to be called inside the outpatient pediatric clinic of a private hospital in Pasig. It was time for the child’s monthly checkup, sponsored by the foundation.
“Payat ito dati, kitang kita yung mga buto (Before, he was so thin you could see his bones),” she said, referring to the now-plump child she was cradling., whose biological mother was in prison. She doesn’t yet know when he’s set to leave.
Her worst separation came when a child she was fostering died of cancer in her care. The child was already waiting for adoption when he was diagnosed, Rupillo said, and was two years and seven months old when he passed away. “Iyon ang pinakamasakit na nangyari (That was what hurt the most),” she said tearfully, bouncing her current foster child gently on her lap as she talked.
The child coughed. She patted his back, and was on to her next story.
Foster parents might even have a bigger responsibility to their foster children than to their biological ones, in fact— ”Kung doble yung pag-iingat nila sa anak nila, sa foster child, mas triple, quadruple pa (If care for a biological child is double, care for a foster one is triple, even quadruple),” said Verdan, the social worker from PFP.
But she was quick to point out that the love was the same.
Nanay Onang alluded to that same love, too, when asked how she would encourage people to become foster parents. She smiled and laughed a lot, even when she noted how Filipinos seemed to be “picky” when it came to choosing children to care for—”gusto maganda, gusto mestiza,” she said, unlike foreigners who only specified a gender and an age and discriminated no further.
“Maraming blessings,” she continued. “Hindi financial kundi kulawagan ng pag-iisip, ng kalooban, na ibinibigay ng Diyos kasi kami ay nag-aalaga ng mga batang walang nagmamahal. Ang pagmamahal ay libre, yan ay ibinibigay sa mga taong nangangailangan (There are a lot of blessings; not financial but peace of mind that God provides because we take care of unloved children. Love is free, it’s given to people who need it).”