Infant care centres to close in January, but are the alternatives ready?
Infant institutions across Czechia, which have looked after the country’s youngest children for decades, are set to close down in January 2025. They are to be replaced in that function by foster parents or another type of institutional care, but the approaching deadline has some concerned that it will not be possible to find alternatives for all the remaining infants in their care.
Infant institutions (kojenecké ústavy), which look after children up to three years of age, will cease to function at the beginning of next year. This results from landmark legislation passed in 2021, which made it illegal to place children up to three years old into such institutions. However, there are still concerns for the fate of the few infants still in their charge, numbering at around forty. A further seventy children over the age of four are also affected by the change. The plan is to place them all into the care of foster parents, extended family or specialist institutions by January, but the search for a suitable alternative may continue up to the last minute.
Year on year, the number of children aged three years or younger in these institutions has been decreasing. Although their closure was previously postponed by a year, Petra Kačírková, Director of the Department of Family Policy, Child Protection and Social Inclusion at the Ministry of Labour, speaking to Radiožurnál, was confident about the success of the transition:
“Yes, I think it will be successful, because the Ministry of Labour is in fact intensively supporting the relevant institutions in finding a solution for those children for whom a permanent solution has not yet been found. At the same time, many of those facilities are already ready to operate from January under a different system … to provide a different type of service.”
Many of the infant institutions across the country have been in service since the first half of the twentieth century. The first was opened in 1922 in Prague, and they reached their peak during the communist era, when all childcare facilities were state-run. Yet the overall system has since been criticised and deemed unfit for service, as Ms. Kačírková explained:
“Research since the 1950s, not only abroad, but also in our country … has shown that for such young children, the care has been care en masse, which can actually be harmful ... This is not necessarily a criticism of the people, the caregivers and nurses, who have worked in these facilities for a long time, but rather a criticism of the system. The system as it was set up, although it was very expensive, did not actually benefit these children at all. On the contrary, it harmed them in the long term, and they suffered because they did not experience the care of that one specific person in early childhood, and could not establish an emotional attachment.”
The alternative sources of care for the roughly one hundred and twenty children affected by the institutions’ closure are varied. Because of serious disabilities, some will move to facilities that can provide long-term inpatient care. Others will be fostered on a short-term or long-term basis, although there has been a lack of potential foster carers in recent years.
To remedy the situation, in July, the Czech parliament approved an amendment to the act on the social and legal protection of children that should increase the number of foster parents in the country. Regional and charitable campaigns have also been working to solve the shortage, with ‘Fostering Days’ organised by the Municipality of Prague back in June.
