Since 2017, Philippines have been experiencing an economic growth. Despite all of that, it is still considered as a Third World Country. Nowadays, the term Third World Countries has come to define a certain country to have high poverty rates, economic instability, and lack basic human necessities. With all of these together, another predicament rose the increase of neglected children in the country.
According to an article written by Kaiman and De Leon (2016), about 1.8 million children in the Philippines are considered abandoned or neglected which is more than 1% of the country’s population.
The contributing factors are namely: extreme poverty, victims of natural disasters, and armed conflicts (Vergara, Angeles, Pagkalinawan, & Villafranca, 2018). These children are either found or just simply left out there to survive on their own. But when they are found, they are going to be brought straight to orphanage and small organization will provide them the necessities that they lack. The problem is, they are not actually related each other.
Imagine being separated to your parents or having no parents at all and then growing A family is composed of two or more people that are living together in one roof. People value this concept since it is where the start of every child’s creativeness, personality, knowledge, and beliefs are practiced and enhanced based on different traditions and cultures of a country.
Filipinos are well known for being family-oriented which serves as a source of their strengths but on the other hand, this plays a great problem in the country. Children that are below 18 years old who are abandoned or no longer have parents are considered orphans and there are about 1.8 million of them (Angeles et al., 2018). This population contributes to extreme poverty and children that are victims of natural disasters. These children are therefore found roaming around the streets alone with no roof or any survival necessities. They are brought straight to the orphanage and taken care of by small organizations in the country that are somewhat not related to each other. This can be one of the factors that could make the child struggle on communicating well.
Bethany Christian Services (n.d) stated that there are different types of orphans in an orphanage. A ‘single orphan’ whose mother or father of the child is deceased, a ‘maternal orphan’ is a child whose mother had died, a ‘paternal orphan’ whose father of the child had died, and a ‘full orphan’ refers to a child whose both parents had died. These children experienced big grief and in a lot of trauma, making it hard to manage things normally. The Philippines have orphans care center around Metro Manila that are not active in social media and do not even entertain to answer questions. This act of irresponsibility happened in Sub Saharan, Africa where the government, with the society, does not address this issue (Fredriksson-Bass & Kanabus, 2004).
Guaranteed, children who experience a lack of support and love leads to the emotional problem and can be physically abused. The struggles of being an orphan at an early age destroy one’s concept of family and the eagerness of being taken care of with equal service. Living with new faces and trying to fit in a society is a new stage of a child, that must be addressed more. Environmental factors can affect a child’s behavior. The longer they are locked up in substandard environmental conditions, the lower their intelligence becomes (Skeels & Fillimore, 1937).
What Is Life Without Parents. (2021, Dec 31). Retrieved from https://paperap.com/what-is-life-without-parents/