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Marek Andrzejewski: Parental authority from the perspective ofthe Head of Children’s Care Home

On November 9, 2022, the Faculty of Educational Studies at Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań hosted a meeting with Mr.Wojciesz Walczak, a director of Children’s Care “Home Pamiątkowa/ Home Filarecka”. The topic for the meeting was “Parental authority from the perspective ofthe Head of Children’s Care Home”.

The host of the meeting was Professor Marek Andrzejewski from the Institute of Legal Studies in the Polish Academy of Sciences, having a part-time job at the faculty.  The event had a question-and-answer session, during which the participants of the meeting, i.e. staff and students of the Faculty, could ask the guest questions. Among those discussants were pedagogues employed at the faculty, i.e., Professor UAM Agnieszka Barczykowska and Andrzej Ratajczak, Ph.D.

The meeting was a part of a scientific project “The Content of Parental Responsibility” supervised by the Central European Academy in Miskolc within the framework of the Central European Professors’ Network founded by the Ferenc Mádl Institute for Comparative Law.

The event was held at the faculty thanks to the kindness of the Dean of the Faculty of Educational Studies, Professor Agnieszka Cybal-Michalska.

At the beginning of the meeting, the host, Professor Marek Andrzejewski introduced the Central European Professors’ Network to the audience and outlined its objectives and aims. He presented the Network as a group of scientists who set the goal for themselves to define and describe the identity of Central Europe and its specific character that distinguishes it from Western and Eastern Europe, especially in the area of formulation of laws and their application, in this case of the family law.

Professor Andrzejewski admitted that the need for a debate between lawyers and pedagogues was justified by the need for a reflection on the problem of the parent-child relationship from the two perspectives. In this joint deliberation of representatives of the two disciplines, the law should play an important role, but by no means decisive.

Lawyers dealing with the subject of the family (both as academics and practicing family judges) should draw their knowledge and inspiration not only from the field of pedagogy but also from active psychologists, social workers, doctors, and sociologists.  Lawyers dealing with family issues must open up to other people and their schemata; they should not only limit themselves to analyzing legal texts based on the meta-language peculiar to these texts.

In response to the first question, Director Wojciech Walczak described the institution he is a head of and its characteristics: the number and age span of children residing in it; legal and pedagogical status of their parents; its headquarters (the last two years it has been composed of two houses, each accommodating 14 children); methods of working with children, and ways of providing support to their parents.

Then he went on to discuss the parents of these children. He distinguished three types of parents. One group is made up of parents who try to get back their children. They follow the advice and suggested guidelines on how to overcome a family crisis; they attend therapy, look for jobs, improve living conditions, etc.

The second group, unfortunately the largest one, includes parents who are apathetic, passive, resigned, and have accepted the fact that their children are raised by carers and that they at most visit their children. A natural consequence of such an approach is a long-term stay of their children at the children’s care home. The family courts are not firm towards these parents; they do not deprive them of parental authority. Such a lenient approach of the court seems to be justified if the parents are important people in the life of their children; if the children look towards to their visits and miss them. However, there are times when parents even stop visiting their children. Then the attitude of the court should be very firm.

The least numerous groups are parents who seek confrontation with the institution, who are very demanding but who do little for the child themselves.

According to Director Wojciech Walczak, it is a mistake to be lenient with parents before a child is placed in a foster care institution. If long-term support, on many fronts – therapeutic, social, economic, and pedagogical – does not result in a quick improvement of the family situation, then the parents get used to that support, and over time they even expect to be assisted (they show a demanding attitude). The worst side effect of the situation is that their determination to change their behaviour in such a way that the child can come to them, decreases. This effect can be referred to as demoralization. In other words, parents of children who live in a children’s care home become demoralized because of poorly provided assistance – the assistance was not consistently conditioned on their fulfilment of the requirements specified in the social contract.

In a following discussion, Director Wojciech Walczak’s introductory remarks, he was asked about the situation of children leaving the foster care home, about the cooperation of the foster care institution with other institutions supporting the family, and about ways to cooperate with parents with mental illness (more and more children have mentally ill parents and it is difficult to cooperate with them in raising the child).

Reactions of students to the views expressed by Mr. Walczak seem to suggest they were surprised and challenged by those views. This is perhaps because the hard truth about the foster care home is little known and revealing it was the greatest value of this meeting.

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