The lived experience of being an institutionalized child. Historical statements of children being reared in children's homes as compared to the reported life of children who had to spend their childhood in hospitals for people infected with tuberculosis. A search for an explanation

Project summary

In this project 37 children from 11 different orphanages are telling their stories having spent parts of their childhood away from biological parents. These children have been away from three to nineteen years and the youngest was 6 months when found on a flagstone. The project was launched with the idea that there might be other groups of children who, in a similar way, had the experience of being moved out of the family, brought to an institution, raised by unfamiliar people and their contact with biological parents were negligible. Such a group is for instance the children who were treated in big sanatorias for tuberculosis. . Even if the main goal of the study was to reveal the experiences of the children as orphans, part two was to find out if the other group (n=11), as hospitalized children, had experiences which might resemble or even be equal to those of the children from children's homes. If they were different, that might have been taken as a sign of different conditions in the two institutions. Probably the life worth living was to be found in the hospitals where the child was sick and supposed to be nursed. However, if the result would be that the children had been suffering much the same life, the reason for that had to be that they were treated in a way more typical to the adults' way of relating to children than to special rules and regulations specific to the institutions. This last proposition proved to be true. The two groups had much the same experiences and the results are interpreted in accordance with Alice Miller's way of seeing the parent-child relationship. The data, as the interviews advanced, were continually treated in a grounded theory manner without insisting that all rules were followed due to the nature of the project. Consequiential comments are made concerning external control of institutions - both for children and adults, as well as on the responsibility the universities have for bringing this kind of approach to the students' agenda.