介绍:
Ms Li is a parent living in Nanjing of east China's Jiangsu province. Her adult son has already started working, so she decided to take in an 8-year-old orphan girl.
"When she first came to our home, she didn't know how to use chopsticks and grabbed food with her bare hands. Now she knows how to use chopsticks. We are a big family, and everyone likes her."
Based on China's Ministry of Civil Affairs, there are nearly 550,000 orphans across the country. But child welfare institutions are only able to provide sufficient facilities for about 100,000 children.
The huge gap gives rise to the demand of foster care.
Different from adoption, fostered children are still under the custody of welfare institutions. The government is responsible for the education, medical care and living costs of the children. Meanwhile, the foster parents receive around 1000 yuan per month for taking care of the kids.
Hou Xiaoxue is the deputy head of Zhengzhou Children Welfare Center.
"Foster care is to provide a better living condition for the children, to find a home for them. So they can grow up under the care of parents and family."
Under the new rule, each foster family can take in a maximum of two children, instead of the current three, provided that the family does not have a child of its own aged below six.
The parents are also required to have completed at least nine years of formal education and financial status should be at least average for their region.
Zhang Wenjuan is the deputy director of Beijing Juvenile's Legal Aid and Research Center.
"Previously, the subsidies were quite low, so most of the foster families were from the countryside where the living costs were relatively low. Most of the families could provide good care. But compared with cities, the quality of education and medical service still lagged behind. So the new requirement is actually trying to find a better community for the children. "
Meanwhile, different from the current rules, the new regulation also specifies that street children could be taken in by foster families.
Zhang says it is good move as the street children are most suitable for foster care, but there are further problems waiting to be tackled.
"Foster care is only a transitional period. The problem is how to connect foster care with long-term care. For the street children whose parents can not be found, it remains a problem that who should be the guardian of the children or whether the foster family could be the guardian. Such question needs further discussion."
Currently, about 30,000 children are living in foster families across the country.
For CRI, I'm Wang Wei.
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