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House of Three Wishes (www.dumtriprani.cz ) A non-governmental, non-profit organisation whose mission is to provide comprehensive help to needy children and their families, with the aim of enabling their secure development in their original family. It was founded in 2003, and Jindřiška Karlíková has been its director for four years.
also preparing an information leaflet, which will introduce the House of Three Wishes to parents. Establishing direct communication with vulnerable families is very difficult. Often the parents are in denial that their problems have become so serious that the situation threatens their children. We would like to show them that they can contact us without acquiring the stigma of a “problem family”. Do schools appreciate your efforts to work with them? Once they become familiar with our services in practice, they find out that mutual cooperation is very beneficial to them – whether we are talking about resolving difficult family situations, behavioural problems, or just tutoring a child to improve his or her grades. In most cases, our work with the child and the child’s family is reflected in how the child behaves at school, in the child’s studies. When we succeed in helping the child this way, we are the first ones teachers will call in the event of further problems. Do more organisations seek to work with schools? I don’t know of any other non-profit one. As part of prevention campaigns, for example, police visit schools, as do organisations that deal with the prevention of bullying or prevention of substance abuse. In our field, though, we are unique, as far as I know. In what other ways are you exceptional in your field in the Czech Republic? Our activities are unique in several respects. The first one is that we focus on both the child and the child’s family. Our second unique feature is that we operate three different facilities, where we can offer the child and its family exactly the help they currently need. We have two outpatient facilities of the Centre our clients come to. In one we work both with children and their parents, the other one focuses primarily on children. The third facility is residential. There we take in children exposed to long-term conflicts between parents, children with behavioural disorders, neglected or mentally, physically or sexually abused children. There we however also help families who are going through a temporary crisis and are unable to care for their children. What are the most common reasons for parents losing the ability to take care of their children? Parents can get into a difficult social situation. They fall ill, decide to undergo a detox treatment, they are in jail or suffer an injury requiring hospitalisation and have nowhere else to place their child. Our residential facility allows them to accommodate children in 22
a safe environment so they can fully concentrate on solving their problems. A large number of these children however often come to us from such a family environment, where the parents cannot handle their parental role and are mostly immature and unprepared to be parents. We regularly consult their situation with all the parents and gradually, step by step, we try to modify the environment so that it is more appropriate for the child. Do all your clients have access to all three facilities? Yes. Depending on the specific situation of each child and family, we can prepare exactly the care that will help them most effectively. In this regard, there is another peculiarity that distinguishes us from other institutions. In our team dedicated to children there is a social worker, a special needs teacher and a psychologist, all working together. We therefore see the threats from three different points of view and can work on solving them in three different environments. When a child comes to you, what kind of help do you offer? First of all, we need to map exactly in what situation the child is in and what the risks stemming from this are. Then we work on specific steps designed to improve the family situation. Some of these may seem trivial. For example, when it comes to problems during a divorce, we want to ensure the handover of the child takes place in peace and without delay. The parents should greet each other when they meet, should not discuss their differences in front of the child and should not speak badly of one another. In the case of social problems, we draw up a precise plan for who the parent should turn to when looking for a job, what institutions he or she should deal with to find alternative housing. As a follow-up, we then monitor whether the parents are adhering to these planned steps. What happens the moment a child leaves you? Are you in touch with the family after that as well? After the child leaves the residential care facility, the care usually continues in the outpatient centres, which the child visits with its parents – for consultations, tutoring, and the like. Our experience has taught us that without such follow-up care, problems usually quickly resurface again after the end of the residential care. After the end of the outpatient care too, the family must be checked up on by the government department in charge of the social and legal protection of children. In an ideal case, we will establish this kind of relationship with the families, so that they turn to us themselves if they have further problems.