Children Withdrawn from Family Life: the senses of the institutional shelter

Abstract

Qualitative, descriptive, and cross-sectional study, whose objective was to understand the meaning that the child in institutional shelter attributes to his/her refuge situation. Five children aged between three and eleven years old, who are sheltered in a foster home, participated in the study. The data were collected through playful interview, semi-structured interview and participant observation, analyzed by the Thematic Content and Enunciation Analysis. The results were discussed from the Winnicottian perspective. The participants felt well at the institution and showed that they did not know the reasons for welcoming them.  They gave it a sense of distance from their primary caregivers, of determining their futures, of their relationships, of the time of reception, in the name of necessary protection, but not always effective and affective. It is concluded that there is a need for more effective communication between the institution and the host, in which the degrees of development of each child are considered, which favors their understanding and the elaboration of the meanings.