Better Childhood Service is calling for registration on the Foster Family Plan

Law 21,302, adopted in 2021, creates the National Service for the Specialized Protection of Children and Adolescents, called “Better Children”, as a public, decentralized body endowed with legal personality and its own assets, subject to the supervision of the President of the Republic through the Ministry of Social Development and Family and are also subject to supervision by the Undersecretariat for Children.

The aim of the Better Childhood service is to guarantee specialized protection to children and adolescents whose rights have been severely violated, in addition to working to restore them while repairing the damage done with programs designed to avoid new vulnerabilities.

The Office for Better Childhood is responsible for ensuring that action mechanisms are developed and programs are in place to meet the intervention needs of every child and adolescent.

The body must provide a specialized clinical diagnosis, monitor the life situation and environmental conditions of the minor, as well as promote family strengthening.

Currently, in the Biobío region, there are 10,980 children admitted to the Better Childhood Service network, of which 477 belong to residences where 22 independent organizations collaborate with projects and five direct administrative institutions with Better Childhood.

Since October 1, 2021, when the legal succession of the National Juvenile Service, Sename, to the Better Childhood Service was made official, 13,401 requests issued by the family courts have been counted to date.

This includes all the work of the previous service, and the programs are delivered by professional specialists in various fields, both for juveniles and adolescents, and for the families that host them.

They also strengthen the field of prevention so that violations do not reach levels where courts decide to send juveniles to homes, prevent them from abuse, and train families in foster care skills.

Speaking to La Tribuna newspaper, Karolina Baskounian, regional director(s) of Better Childhood Service, explained some new aspects of this service that Sename did not have, for example “training and technical assistance, at the country level, where different professionals from our network are part of these modalities. We strive to strengthen the teams, because we know that they have been working for many years, have high training, but they needed accompaniment from the Office.

In the region, the challenge is to increase the number of foster families for minors and that there are two types: extended, which can be relatives of children or adolescents, and also external, to which the challenge is to respond, as a region, with Law 21,302 , which tells us that the type of care we should provide for children aged zero to three is foster care.

The evidence shows that the damage done to a severely vulnerable child can be repaired and there is a successful track record where foster families, plus all the personalized support individualized to each child, generate progress and improvements in intervention processes,” explained the director ( s ) from Best Childhood Biobío.

“In Los Angeles, we have an active foster care program, both from the Administration for Better Childhood and cooperating agencies. For this, the requirements are minimal, it can be any type of family”, Karolina added.

For people who are interested in being a foster family, go to the website www.mejorninez.cl and then a professional explains in detail how the process is, what it means to be a foster family, then assessment and strengthening of some competencies.

“Finally, the list of families that can be part of the network of families that can accept children who are severely abused and need to be separated from their family group is entered in the register,” said the director.

The Better Childhood Office of Biobío invites people to become part of the programs, because the experience of foster families is very effective. “We want people to buy into the culture of foster care,” he said. Although a technical evaluation of each Office procedure is performed, the director recalled that it is not up to the agency alone, “because it is a joint effort with the family courts that work on protective cases like adoption and that we need all the other services as well like the judiciary to review their protocols and timelines,” he stressed.