Family work in the House of Mercy rehabilitation center

Strengthening family as a way of preventing orphanhood

The state of the family today

"The role of family in the formation of the personality is exceptional; no other social institution can substitute it. The erosion of family relations inevitably entails the deformation of the normal development of children and leaves a long, and to a certain extent indelible trace in them for life.

Orphanhood with parents alive has become a crying disaster of society today. Thousands of abandoned children who fill orphanages and sometimes find themselves in streets point to a profound illness of society. Giving these children spiritual and material help and seeing to it that they are involved in religious and social life, the Church at the same time considers it one of her most important duties to raise parents' awareness of their calling, which would exclude the tragedy of the aban-doned child".

Basic Social Concept of the Russian Orthodox Church

Family work in the House of Mercy rehabilitation center

The House of Mercy in St. Petersburg is a social rehabilitation center intended for children caught in tight situations. It gives asylum to abandoned children and children who cannot stay in their families because of their parents' alcoholism, neglect or cruelty. The city administration has ordered that a child's sojourn in the center should be limited to one year. After that he or she should be returned to his or her family or placed permanently either in a new family or an orphanage.

The priority right of family to child raising is secured by Articles 54, 55 and 123 of the Russian Federation Family Code. The Commentary to the Family Code (Commentary to the Family Code Article 123 in Commentary to the Family Code, ed. I. M. Kuznetsov, BEK Publishers, Moscow 1996, p. 314) underlines that "only in those cases when a child cannot be placed in a family, he or she shall be put in an appropriate institution, depending on his or her age and health condition, and provided with full support by the state". "A particular placement is determined by the interests of the child, considering the concrete circumstances in which he or she was deprived of parental care…" (Ibid.)

Priority given to child raising in family is determined not only by the legal norms of the Family Code, but also the pro-found meaning and spiritual calling that the family has. I. Ilyin (1883-1854), one of the brightest philosophers of the Russian Renaissance, noted: "No 'kindergartens' or 'orphanages' or such like false substitution for family can give a child what he needs. For the principal force in child raising is the mutual feeling of personal indispensability that ties up par-ents with a child and a child with parents in a unique bond, which is the mysterious bond of blood love. It is in family and in family alone that a child feels unique and irreplaceable, suffered-for and inseparable-from, blood of the blood and bone of the bone. A creature who arose from the innermost compatibility of two other creatures and who owes them his life. A person made sweet and agreeable once for all in all his physical, mental and spiritual peculiarities. Nothing can replace this; and however affectionately may an adopted child be raised, he will always sigh to himself for his father and mother by blood…" (I. A. Ilyin. The Way of Spiritual Renewal.)

Therefore, despite all the complexity and intricacy of life situations in families, our Center has given priority to the family-like forms of organization. After the Center admits a child, it tries first to establish whether he can be returned to his family, then to find out whether he can be brought up by relatives and only after that to explore an opportunity for his place-ment in a foster or adoptive family. Only if such a family cannot be found, an orphanage is chosen for him. Rehabilitation cen-ters normally state in their statutes the need to work not only with children, but also those around them. A center for placing children, however, can only give recommendations, because the Russian Federation Family Code gives these functions to guardianship bodies under the local self-government. This means that a guardianship body can order a child to be returned to his family or placed in an orphanage regardless of the opinion of the Center's specialists. On the other hand, the opportunity for the Center to work with the family of a child in a profound way is considerably enhanced if it negotiates its work with guardianship bodies to reach mutual understanding and agreement on joint work in the interests of the child.

Work with a family begins immediately after a request comes from it to help it out of a difficult situation. A request can also come from a guardianship officer or militia. It is extremely important that a visit to a child's family be made before the admission (if it is possible, of course). The visit is essential in case of a request coming from a child's parents or rela-tives. Social workers can thus not only see the situation in the family, but also act efficiently to resolve a domestic conflict. In case of this "early intervention" the child stays in his family and work with it continues till the tough situation is resolved through appropriate psychological and social assistance. Our experience has shown that if a child leaves his family the situa-tion in it changes drastically and normally takes more time and effort to be resolved it even after the child comes back.

The Russian Federation Family Code states in Article 77 that guardianship bodies may withdraw a child from his family if there is a direct threat to his life and health. However, it gives not precise criteria for assessing the family situa-tion; more often than not these criteria are subjective and dependent on the opinion of guardianship officers. Often a child him-self leaves his family and in some time finds his way to an asylum after an experience of vagrancy. Children give these reasons for their escape from the family: their parents' hard drinking, quarrels, knocks, cruel treatment, long absences and the feeling of their own uselessness. These reasons show that the family fails to give love and proper upbringing to the child. Most fami-lies experience financial difficulties, but financial trouble does not appear to be a decisive factor but rather a background for the general disintegration of the family.

When it admits a child, the Center makes a comprehensive inquiry into his and his family situation. It also seeks to apprehend all his family relations, relationships with his relatives and other social contacts in order to establish possibilities for preserving him family or identify prospects for his placement or develop an individual rehabilitation program for him.

To this end, the Center's specialists visit the child's family to examine its living and child raising conditions. In doing so, they try to look into their conditions of life and their income, to detect any problems of alcoholism, drug-addiction and poor health of the parents and family members. They take notice of the general atmosphere in the family, especially the behavioral peculiarities, relationships among the family members and attitude to the child's problems and explore the possibilities for ar-ranging a treatment or a rest or additional education. If possible, this investigation is held together with guardianship officers.

After this complex diagnostics, the Center works out an individual rehabilitation program for the child. Working step-by-step with his parents, the Center sets aims and develops measures for resolving the difficult situation in his family. This may include help to obtain necessary papers, find a job, obtain a pension or an allowance, change residence, undergo a treat-ment for alcoholism and drug-addiction, receive special psychological aid, arrange a different form of education for the child, etc. The work with families is carried out in the Center by specialists in social work, a psychologist and tutors. They monitor the development of relations in the family, the emotional state of the child after his meetings with his parents and changes in the social status of the family. If the situation in the family becomes normal, the child is returned to his parents. Unfortunately, specialists to state that more often than not it is only fear of loosing their child that makes parents consider changing their way of life. In these cases, they have to adopt a tough administrative attitude, explaining to parents that they may be deprived of their parental rights.

At the same time, a family can receive a great help from the Church. In the church sacraments the human soul is healed and reinforced for forgiveness, patience, family efforts and education of children. From the Church both children and parents usually derive strength to restore seemingly ruined family relations. Children's prayer and parents' repentance help to heal inveterate family illnesses.

A certain drug-dependent mother gave her child to the Center for daycare, concealing it from the father who also used drugs. Until that moment, the life of the family was full of lively impressions. The parents with their son had traveled through-out Europe. The boy had attended one of the elite schools in St. Petersburg. The reasons for application were given as the mother's critical state of health (sepsis, pneumonia, and cardiac ailment) and the child's poor health. Because all the money earned was used to buy drugs, they had to starve for long periods of time. The father tried to conceal his dependence on drugs from his son, but the boy was fully aware of it. The father often beat his wife and son. The boy suffered from a serious neuro-logical disorder, his psyche almost exhausted. His encapraesis was also a consequence of the experience of a sudden change that happened in his family because of his parents' drug-addiction. The mother was detained with a dose of heroin she bought in the street for her demanding husband. An action was brought against her for keeping drugs. But unlike her husband, she undertook a course of treatment for drug-dependence. We helped her during the court proceedings and repeatedly placed her at a rehabilitation center. For some time the family would re-unite, but the father did give up drugs. He died in summer 2000. For two years, the Center's specialists, working together with the mother and the son, maintained their mental and physical health, organizing the child's education first through individual studies, for he had to leave his elite school, then through lessons at his home, and protecting their right to housing. They managed to preserve their life and health as well as their relations. The child has been living with his mother for two years now.

Yet even after the child's comeback, the family needs to be accompanied on a permanent basis and to be given occa-sional aid and support. Normally the Center keeps taking care of a family for a half year and sometimes even longer to avert a crisis. But even after the attendance is lifted, a family is entitled to appeal to the Center for aid and support.

A boy by name of Volodya spent most of his time in the street, begging at a metro-station. His mother and stepfather were alcoholics, and the stepfather treated him badly. He would tie the boy to the heating radiator, beat him and deny him food for long periods of time. After Volodya was placed in the asylum, the mother began to show a lively interest in his upbringing. She undertook a course of medical treatment for her alcoholic dependence, found a job and parted with her husband who never stopped drinking. In a half-year time, the child was returned to his mother and at present lives with her. For two years, how-ever, the mother regularly asked the Center to take the child for the period of school holidays. The boy himself would come to the asylum when his mother was taken to hospital.

Unfortunately, our experience shows that with time fewer and fewer children come back to their families. Drug-addiction and alcoholism among parents is growing. This dependence makes a child's coming back to his family actually im-possible. In this situation our task is to find a new environment for raising a child and to prepare his parents for the prospect of having him raised outside his own family, while preserving as far as possible warm emotional relations with him.

Unbroken family relations between a child and his parents and relatives may be the most important factor for success in raising him outside his own family. We know from our experience how persistent are many teenagers, who were abandoned immediately after their birth, in attempts to find their parents and relatives. The longer a child stays in a foster house the stronger his desire to find his kin, to learn about his past, to understand the reason for his alienation. For him a meeting with his relatives often means reconciliation with life, acceptance of his fate, forgiveness of his relatives, and spiritual maturing.

A mother abandoned S. in the maternity home. He was raised first in an orphanage, then in an asylum. At the age of 16 this teenager, who had lost sight by that time, managed to find his mother in a hospital, to reconcile with her and to forgive her. She died the day after the reunion. For over a year now, the teenager keeps in contact with his grandmother, stepfather and stepbrothers and sisters.

A., 6, and S., 12, before the admission to the asylum, lived with their parents, degraded vagrants who begged at a church-porch. It took great efforts to persuade them to send the children to the asylum. Initially the parents came to visit them frequently, bringing some "gifts" from the church. Soon the father died, the mother surviving him for a year. One child was taken by relatives, while the other by a sister from the Brotherhood of St. Anastasia, with whom she has lived for seven years now. A. loved it in a new family. But the feeling of anxiety and guilt before her parents did not leave her until she came to her mother's grave to say goodbye to her and to have a requiem served for her.

Since 1995 the Center has been actively involved in placing children in foster families. To this end, it has set up a Divi-sion for Foster Family Groups, which are families who undertake to rehabilitate and foster children. Such a family concludes a contract with the Center for the rehabilitation period under which one of the parents is put on the staff of the Center as family group tutor. A foster family group is to prepare a child for his consequent placement in the same family as custodian, adoptive or foster family.

It should be noted that we try to seek family group tutors first of all from among a child's relatives and social circle. Out of 94 children placed in families, 20 were sent to relatives and 25 to parishioner families of the Brotherhood of St. Anasta-sia and other Orthodox parishes with whom the Center maintains close cooperation.

The placement of a child outside his natural family is always a painful process both for him and his parents. Therefore, in taking the decision to put a child in a foster family group, we seek to make those who take him understand that his parents are important for him, though he may not live together with them. This attitude helps all sides to go through the painful process of deprivation of parental rights necessary for placing a child outside his natural family. In the Center's practice, there were cases where a child's parents and foster families became partners working in close cooperation.

Since 1999, the Center has run a School for Adoptive Parents training future family group tutors for work with chil-dren. It is attended be all the future family group tutors and children's relatives. One of the most important topics for them is to learn to preserve a child's family relations and to normalize his relationships with his natural parents. A graduate of the School has the right to take up any child he or she likes. Moreover, many adults who have completed the course have come to realize the difficulties of child raising and make no haste to assume the responsibility for fostering a child. Nevertheless, it can be stated today that it is possible to find a suitable foster family group for almost every child under 10 to become consequently its adopted or foster child.

In 2001, the Center organized an Adoptive Parents' Club for those who took children from the House of Mercy asylum. There are some 50 members. During their weekly meetings they discuss their problems with psychologists and specialists, exchange experience and search together for ways out of difficult situations. Among always-welcome guests are the Center's director Vladislav Nikitin and Father Alexander Stepanov. Some adoptive families enter the church and attend catechism classes, which helps them continue their children's church life which began in the asylum.

Among new forms of family work in the Center are temporary family groups. These groups do not have eventual adop-tion as their goal. They are intended rather to provide temporary rehabilitation for children within family. Temporary family groups help rehabilitate children with serious physical and emotional disorders and take care of children after a treatment and during school holidays. These groups are especially effective in providing rehabilitation for small children. Indeed, a small child's stay in an orphanage, as psychologists maintain, entails considerable retardedness in his development. Whenever the Center is asked to find a placement for a child, we try to avoid putting him in the asylum, but to send him immediately to a temporary family group. For instance, two such groups have been organized at the Parish of the Holy Martyr Empress Alexan-der, which foster six children from 3 to 5 years of age. The group tutors surrounded the little ones with attention and care and created for them an atmosphere of a big family home. We hope that with time the parish will organize a whole preschool fam-ily-type ward.

In 2000, the Center opened a daytime care ward for children from 7 to 11 years of age at the Vasileostrovsky Teenagers Club to help prevent homelessness. The aim of family work in this ward is to help families to cope with difficulties in raising and educating children, to give them necessary medical and social assistance, to find pastimes for children and to prepare fami-lies for the difficulties of the "awkward age". All the children who come to the day ward can be reckoned as a "risk group", as without timely help and support they will eventually find themselves in the street. Working with families there is specialist in social work and a psychologist. If necessary, the Center invites other specialists, such as doctors, a lawyer and a defectologist. The district administration has undertaken to provide the ward with facilities, to pay the utility rate for it and to direct to the Center the troubled children who live in the district.

When a request comes to admit a child, the Center makes a socio-psychological examination of the child and his fam-ily. The child is provided with free meals. Children are engaged in hobby groups and attend, free of charge, studies in other teenagers clubs in the district. The daily routine includes studies in a circle or a studio and homework, if necessary with the help of a teacher. The necessary regular changes in occupation are envisaged for disadaptive children. The psychological pecu-liarities of a given category of children are taken into account in organizing studies, celebrations and trips and the participation of children in the Center's common affairs. The teachers seek to involve parents in creative activity. The children have made progress in their studies and the situation in most families has improved. Parents have become more active in raising their chil-dren. During the year, three out of ten children were transferred to the after-school group on condition that they continue at-tending hobby circles. Other three children were transferred to the Center's asylum because of an aggravation of the situation in their families, while the rest have continued in the daytime group.

Our experience has shown that the life of children under 11 organized in this way does not require as heavy expenses as their permanent stay in the asylum would entail. It also helps to prevent them from leaving their families, to give timely sup-port to families and to give them necessary material, psychological and legal aid. This kind of aid to families can be organized at schools, teenagers clubs and church parishes.

While realizing that "family will always remain indispensable in social formation and that family gives what no other forms of social units nor a substitute family can offer" (Archpriest V. Zenkovsky. On Religious Education in Family), the Cen-ter still has to consider how the absence of family can be compensated in case where a child cannot be placed in a family. The Center maintains cooperation with family camps to which we send our children for holidays. The Center has enjoyed great support from the church community of the Brotherhood of St. Anastasia in which a teenager can always find support, under-standing and counsel. The club of the Center's former charges enjoys visits from senior teenagers who now live on their own or in orphanages. Students of St. Petersburg Seminary are also among those who share fellowship in the Center. Among regu-lar activities in the Center are meetings, pilgrimages, excursions and hikes.

The experience of club work is new to the Center. Therefore, we will be grateful if parishes and organizations experi-enced in organizing parents clubs and teenagers associations will share their experience with us.

G. Kurganiova
Deputy Director
House of Mercy

Telephone for contacts: (812) 321-0775

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Strengthening family as a way of preventing orphanhood

It would not be an exaggeration to say that family in Russian society today is going through a profound crisis. The rate of divorce has increased drastically to over 50% of the marriages. Divorces are often caused by alcoholism, drug-addiction, mutual unfaithfulness of spouses, inability of parents to support their children, and absence of normal housing con-ditions. But the decisive reason for instability in families and for parents' failure to raise their children properly lies not in ex-ternal but internal factors in people's lives. They are the erosion of Christian spiritual and moral family tradition, decline in the general culture of human relations and extreme ignorance as to the spiritual meaning of family, marriage and parenthood.

The lack of confidence in the future, loss of the meaning of life, loneliness and lack of trust in each other and the loss of the feeling of family and home are typical today.

Even when a child is raised in family, he often does not know of real fatherhood and motherhood and becomes actually "an orphan of living parents". The loss of psychological contact with their children prevents parents from learning and appreci-ating the true reasons for their psychological breakdowns, suicides, poor progress in school, bad behavior, and various of-fences. Unable to understand their child and reluctant to help him out of difficult and crucial situations, parents first acknowl-edge their own helplessness, then develop a fear of their own children because of ever more new problems the bring home, then feel exasperated and finally oust them gradually to the street. Drug-addiction, hard drinking, prostitution in early age, hoo-liganism become natural consequences of the disintegration of the family as a single whole and the loss of parental functions.

Almost any family caught in a crisis situation can survive and overcome the most difficult problem if it takes the right spiritual direction towards the unity of its members and readiness to do together the difficult task of building new rela-tionships based on love and trust in one another. It is important to stress that a spiritually healthy family is not the one in which there are no difficulties or problems, but the one which can react correctly to complications arising in life. In face of dangers and troubles, such a family does not panic, nor does it look for the author who violated its well-being. It rather unites in a singe whole, regrouping skillfully its internal relationships and resources so that affective help could be given to its member who suffers the most at the moment.

Clearly, today the child is the most vulnerable member of the family and the most open one to social risk. Growing up and developing, the child brings to his family difficulties and problems peculiar to every stage in his life. An insufficient spiri-tual and social experience and a limited cultural and intellectual scope narrowed further by the pedagogical insufficiency of his parents - all this makes the developing personality dependent on external condition of living. Left without his parents' atten-tion and support, the child loses respect, trust and love for them and at the same time loses the point of support he needs so much. Consequently he gets into all kinds of difficult and unexpected situations. But mutual support and effective help to one another in time of trial build up the feeling of spiritual sharing and unity and enrich both adults and children with the positive experience of overcoming hardships through personal spiritual, volitional, intellectual and emotional efforts.

Yes, you are certainly right in saying that our contemporaries are often spiritually ignorant, though many of them were baptized in early childhood. Because of this, in their search after the purpose and meaning of human life people run counter to the Christian teaching on the salvation of the human soul and to the gospel. In the beginning we all tend to search after treasures on earth rather than in heaven and then have to pay a bitter price for.

As far as family and family relations are concerned, we often see quite savage and pagan approaches taking root here. Newspapers and magazines are full of dazzling advertisements, like "Bewitching. Charming. Returning the beloved with one hundred percent success". However awful it may seem, magicians and enchanters are sometimes more popular today than priests. It happens because the family is disintegrating and people would like to find a quick and simple remedy against their numerous problems. Nobody seems to take effort in the name of Christ and one's neighbors, but everybody wants family hap-piness.

There is, therefore, an acute need for missionary and social service among our own people. It appears impossible with-out a specially organized "Family Salvation Service" based on the common efforts of church and state. The Orthodox Church has something to say to people about marriage, family and child raising. She cherishes the spiritual roots and traditions of fam-ily life, but it is up to public social institutions to call for this precious experience.

Besides, the common efforts of church and state in preventing orphanhood and homelessness would open up an oppor-tunity for an in-depth study of the notion of social aid which society can and must give to those caught in a risk group. Social aid should be understood not only as material aid, such as providing food, clothes, footwear and money, but first of all spiritual and emotional aid. The purpose of this aid is to share with suffering people the positive experience of survival in critical situa-tions through combining efforts and rallying round family members. To this end, it is necessary to combine continuous spiri-tual and educational efforts with the professional work of Orthodox specialists to restore family relationships and correct the mental state and physical development of both children and adults.

The Department for Social, Psychological and Pedagogical Aid to Family and Children at the Tsaritsyno Social Service center (TSS) began its work already in April 1998. It was organized at the request of the TSS administration, who pro-vided it with staff from the Life-Giving Source Orthodox center at Tsaritsyno, which was already known at that time for its social programs.

Thanks to the joint efforts of governmental and public organizations, a real opportunity opened up to make an in-depth analysis of what "social aid to the population" implies.

The staff of the department includes 7 psychologists, teachers and social workers who work selflessly, overstraining themselves.

They work on the principle of Christian charity, giving close consideration to every request and ready to show not only compassion and support to people in trouble but also concrete and effective aid.

Initially, social workers had to persuade the needy who came for clothes and food to go beyond accepting them and use other services offered by the department. Every visitor had an opportunity to make an appointment with a psychologist as a consultant on family life and child raising, to bring in a pre-school child, if he did not go to kindergarten, a development cor-rection group or a creative development studio, to send a child to an excursion, a children's theatre or a walk together with other children, to come for family and children's events, and to enroll a child for therapeutic physical training.

For the four years of its work, the department had 495 visitors, including 94 members of extended families, 33 mem-bers of low-income families, 121 members of one-parent families and 130 members of families of disabled children. In most cases, people complained about their life, means, joblessness, relatives and children who were often in poor health, made poor progress in school, shirked school or fought with their mates, smoked or injected drugs, etc.

As a rule, they believed "some other people" were to be blamed for their troubles. The obstacles that prevented them from improving their situation were their own fear of the need to give up their customary stereotypes of behavior, false shame at revealing their ignorance and laziness, and reluctance to sacrifice certain things for the sake of their child or to make an additional effort. Only some 10% of them blamed themselves for being unprepared for life and child raising.

As the department continued it work, the situation began to change. Thanks to their professional and sensitive attitude, the team began to gain authority and to attract the attention of a growing number of people in the district. Visitors recom-mended others to come to the Tsaritsyno Social Service and appeal to its children's department for advice and spiritual aid. In total, the psychologist has received 400 families or 850 people; the correction group has been attended by 70 pre-school chil-dren; the creative development circles and studios have engaged 100 children of all ages; and the therapeutic physical training has been attended by 60 people. For the four years of its work, the department organized 50 children's events and 3 Paternal Home celebrations, with 150 participants in each. There are monthly excursions for children of all ages in which social teach-ers and parents lead them on tours of Moscow, to the Dolphinarium or the Zoo or the Puppet Theatre or just a walk in the fresh air. Local people favor the winter and summer sports events and relay races organized by the TSS in its territory.

In its practical work with disadaptive families and families in crisis the department has managed to give both parents and children effective aid, considering their life circumstances. The retarded and pedagogically neglected pre-school children who attended the TSS's development correction group eventually entered general school like other children and have proved equal to the task. Their parents were given the recommendations of the psychologist concerning the children's individual pecu-liarities, learnt the methods of working with the children on their own and now put this knowledge in practice.

The teenagers who were sent to the TSS by the Commission for Minors are now engaged in hobby circles, while the Center's social pedagogues patronize these risk-group families at home, monitoring the children's progress in school and their behavior and the micro-climate in their family relations.

The disabled children with serious development defects and movement disorders have been engaged in regular creative development and movement correction lessons in 5- or 6-member groups. The TSS's children's department arranges displays of disabled children's creative works as well as folklore festivals and sports and games events. Parallel to it, the department holds psychological talks and individual consultations with parents of disabled children to promote the positive emotional mood and correct attitude to the limited abilities of their children.

Working in close contact with the nearby general schools, the Society of Extended Families and the Society of Families with Disabled children under the District Tsaritsyno Council, the TSS's department has accompanied children and parents by visiting with the aim to help prevent child neglect and social orphanhood. In this effort, the specialists of the department have made leisure, excursion and culture activities an essential part of their social work with risk-groups as promoting children-parent relations and normal microclimate at home.

The Life-Giving Source Orthodox center has always given a great support to the department in organizing social ser-vice to family and children. Thanks to it, all family members have received access to systematic spiritual education and devel-opment through its Sunday school and Spiritual Lecture-Hall and an opportunity to use its library and bookstore and to share in family pilgrimages to monasteries and churches in Moscow, the Moscow Region and nearby areas. During the years 2000 and 2001, both children and adults could enjoy the free services of a neuropathologist, a psychiatrist, a therapist and an allergolo-gist-immunologist who were invited to cooperate by the Orthodox center.

Annually, over 1500 children and parents apply to the Orthodox center for various kinds of aid.

As a result, the population now perceives the Life-Giving Source and the Department for Social and Psychological-Pedagogical Aid to Family and Children under the Tsaritsyno Social Service as a single social prevention and rehabilita-tion complex engaged in spiritual and moral strengthening of family and protecting the interests of the child. Along with high attendance, another indication of confidence that both children and parents have for specialists is the growing involve-ment of parents themselves and their concern for extending creative work with children and enhancing their readiness for inde-pendent life in society. New organisers, mentors and social workers come forward from among parents, ready psychologically and spiritually to make their own contribution to this work.

Students from the Moscow Theological Academy and Seminary, the Department of Pedagogy of St. Tikhon's Theo-logical Institute and the Department of Psychology of the State Open Pedagogical University come to this social prevention complex to do practical work. Seminars and conferences are also held there to exchange experience.

The Life-Giving Source at Tsaritsyno and the Tsaritsyno Social Service have worked out a project called "The Spiritually Healthy Family". It is intended to combine the experience of the Orthodox Church with scientific achievements in psychology, pedagogy and medicine as well as resources of the system of social security and support for families in the risk-group including extended, low-income, one-parent families, families with disabled children and single mothers.

The primary aim of the project is to strengthen the spiritual-moral and socio-psychological foundations of today's fam-ily, to help create psychological-pedagogical and medical-psychological conditions necessary for strengthening the unity of family members, to promote the birth and raising of healthy children and to help parents master parental educational functions.

The proposed work will have practical significance in that a model of work for spiritual and moral strengthening of family will be developed and implemented to enable many people in the group of social risk to receive concrete help and sup-port.

The experience we have already gained convinces us that the strong family model to be implemented in and outside Moscow will help to prevent orphanhood, vagrancy and crime among teenagers and youth and to decrease the incidence of nervous and mental illnesses and breakdowns among adults. It will also encourage people for social activity and for creative independent work for the benefit of their families and society as a whole. The shifting of attitude from that of "victim" to the "builder" of one's own home and happy family life, expected to happen in the course of experimental and practical work, will also help elevate personal dignity and responsibility for the fate of oneself and one's own children.

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The state of the family today

The situation in Russian society today can be described as spiritual decay and the collapse of traditional values and princi-ples. All these apply to the family as well. The crisis of personality and spirituality has affected family to a very considerable extent. Family is subject to all the deformations that occur in the life around it, but still remains perhaps the last solid ground on which the restoration of Russia can begin. Or else, the disintegration of family will bring nearer her definitive ruin.

Thus the problem of the present state of family is far from being academic; it is a matter of life and death for our people and country.

It is not surprising therefore that the Orthodox Church in the persons of her leaders and ordinary members, especially parents and teachers, are concerned for the state of family, believing the problems of family life and child raising to be ex-tremely serious.

The radical disintegration of all traditional structures and the intense influence that the vices and false values of modern society make on children require equally radical means to oppose this influence everywhere, in every family, parish, Sunday school and gymnasium. But we often prove unarmed and incapable of protecting children from destructive influences. The power of the church people has always lied in their togetherness, which does not at all diminish the personality, but, on the contrary, unfolds it. Togetherness has been replace today by the herd instinct, while personal work by individualism and disso-ciation. The Orthodox pedagogical thought has failed to come to essential unanimity and cohesion and to unite theological precision with personal appeal to the heart of the modern man. Church authors, journalists and teachers are still losing the in-formational war.

Today's Orthodox books on Christian education are often detached from real life. At a time when the very survival of family is at stake, reprinting the 19th century brochures or little books giving child raising recipes does not solve the problem. We believe the path to be taken by the modern church thought and Orthodox pedagogy lies in a different direction.

It is necessary first of all to identify soberly and fearlessly all the painful points, all the spiritual distortions in the pre-sent family and parish life. They are the absence of principles of family life, the failure, especially of parents themselves, to be inchurched and the prevalence of prohibitive methods in both family and school. Besides, this is a superficial and consumerist attitude to child raising, especially popular now in the church milieu, namely, the desire to shift off the responsibility to the priest or teacher. Both Orthodox parents and Orthodox pedagogues tend to shut themselves off the horrors of life around them, to hide in the parish or family as a niche. This attitude, which seems to oppose spiritual against spiritual values, does not actu-ally help to resist destructive forces. The present situation, as our pastors state with bitterness, resembles rather war than peace, making us resort to such military terms as "fight for our children" or battle for children's souls" when we consider education. But to win this battle, we should realise clearly not only what we are against, but also what we are for. In order to win the war for our children, pedagogues and parents must unite efforts, exchange experience and work out new peda-gogical guidelines that will exclude formalism and unfeasibility and guard us against serious failures. Failures in child raising lead to the loss of children and sometimes the entire generations of children. We should seek not unambiguous answers to all acute problems, but rather a common field for cooperation and creative work together. It is more important not to ex-pose the evils of the reality around us, for they are apparent, but to direct all efforts towards developing the ability to show and interpret the truth of Christianity and the beauty of church life using concrete and vivid examples. We do not know how to propagate positive experience, be it the experience of a family, a teacher or a parish, gained both today and in the recent past.

What we need along with good pedagogical literature is living communication between parents and pedagogues, com-mon prayer for our children, lectures and talks by pastors and specialists in family problems. There are still few parishes that have realized that work to strengthen family is a priority task of church life, because without it there will be no parishes left either. The Church of the Three Hierarchs-at-Kulishki has run a School for the Orthodox Family, a seminar for parents, for five years now. Its members have tackled such utterly serious and pressing themes as the Orthodox family today, the crisis of fam-ily and ways out of it, the state of church education and formation, games and toys for our children, problems of the youth and modern rock music, and many others.

Among those who gave lectures were such renowned personalities as Archpriests Valerian Krechetov, Vladislav Sveshnikov, Artemy Vladimirov and others. The papers of the school were used to publish a book entitled "A Feat of Family Education" in 2000 in Moscow. In recent times, the school has taken up questions which are more particular but very impor-tant for those parent who cannot receive answers to them elsewhere. These are the problem of seriously-ill children in a family, ways to help them and rehabilitation possibilities for a whole family with a sick child. Speaking at these seminars were priests, psychologists as well as parents of children who are seriously ill.

These seminars have shown that parents need a meeting place for exchanging experience and consulting a pastor or a specialist. In parish work, it is very important that families should relate to the parish, the gymnasium and the Sunday school. A child should be educated in a concerted spirit, not torn between different educational ideas and guidelines.

One of the most difficult tasks facing parents and pedagogues is not simply to bring children to the Church and com-municate to them a certain amount of knowledge about it, but to inchurch them so that they may begin to live a truly church life. It is an extremely difficult task and almost unfeasible, considering our time. It is not only a problem for children but also for adults, but it must be posed and attempts must be made to solve it with the help of our rich cultural and spiritual traditional experience. The awareness of modern man does not seek "spiritual obviousness", according to I. Ilyin, but rather tends to per-ceive Christianity not as a "way, truth and life" but information or ideology at best. Therefore, it is difficult to communicate to children the obviousness of new life in Christ if parents themselves do not live it.

The most important thing in children's education, we believe, is not so much a search for ready-made answers to diffi-cult questions as addressing the inexhaustible reserves found in church life and God's grace-giving help. The family is built not in passive expectation but in active co-work with God. It is possible only if one's life is not divided into private, public, family and church lives but inchurched entirely.

Ye. Rogachevskaya
Sunday school director
Church of the Three Hierarchs-at-Kulishki
Moscow

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