Abstract
This chapter focuses on a new phenomenon, when small villages take school-aged children into foster care against the background of social and educational policies. First, the child welfare system has undergone deinstitutionalization; therefore, social policies actively stimulated an increase in the number of foster families: the percentage of children placed in foster care, from 2005 to 2015, increased from 2 to 24%. Second, educational reforms were introduced to close schools with a decreasing number of students. For rural schools, this initiative meant shutdown because up to 60% of the schools were underutilized. Some rural communities resisted transforming welfare state and protected their underutilized local schools from shutdown by taking into foster care large number of (pre)school-aged children. Today, there are rural schools where up to 90% of pupils are children admitted into foster care. I argue that transition from institutional care to a family one allows the state to reduce social spending and allows rural communities to outsource the underutilized schools to rural family. These families rely heavily on family resources as household production, gender practices, and intergenerational and intragenerational relations in their rural community to design their care loops. Qualitative data collection is based on 88 individual semi-structured interviews.
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Notes
- 1.
According to the pension reform implemented in 2019, men will retire at 65 and women at 60. However, the retirement age will grow by one year during each year of the transition period until 2028.
- 2.
‘Farm household’ is not an exact translation of the Russian expression ‘lichnoe podsobnoe khozyaystvo’ which means that usually rural family has a plot of land (around 1 ha) that is used for production of vegetables and cattle for own consumption and not for business.
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Galindabaeva, V. (2022). Local Care Loops Among Foster Families in Rural Russia. In: Näre, L., Isaksen, L.W. (eds) Care Loops and Mobilities in Nordic, Central, and Eastern European Welfare States. Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-92889-6_7
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