specific needs of children and elderly left behind as a ... - IOM Moldova

CHAPTER I
experience problems. I don’t like my new classmates as they are rude, they
talk dirty and they are aggressive...” (III_C_19).
When they manage to make friendships, it does not depend on child’s gender
or status: “Most of them are from my school and they’re all from the village,
mainly. They are all my age, a year elder than me. There are an equal
number of boys and girls and they are all from school. We go to the club and
we have fun. We also play soccer during holidays but usually we play volleyball
during school. That’s all we do” (III_C_9).
Experts described experiences that denote children’s inhibition, their isolation
from other people and social shyness as a consequence of the separation
from their parents: “They can sharply feel that there is no one coming
after them, there is no one that cares about them. I am acquainted with a girl
who comes to see me every week and she always cries because her parents divorced
and they’re both away. And her mother promises her that she’ll take her
abroad, and she never even comes to school, the girl lives with her aunt who she
didn’t get along with before, she likes to take care of her own life… Every time I
try to get into contact with her, she just refuses to work with me. I asked the girl
to tell her mother that she needs her more than she needs her father; I gave her
my Skype ID so that we could talk at least on Skype. And her mother told the
girl never to go to a psychologist and that I, as a psychologist, have no right to
get involved in her private life, and that was it” (FG_EC_urban).
It is extremely important which of the parents stays with the child. In most
cases, the woman is the one who is away from the house. The absence of
the mother represents a strong decay generating children’s bad school results
as well as mutual emotional detachment between the mother and her
children. The ones who are emotionally smart can stand the stress better
than the ones who are less emotionally smart. Boys, even if looking more
indifferent towards the separation are even more stressed than the girls,
becoming more vulnerable towards destructive influences. This is accentuated
during some critical development periods or during existential crisis.
During school age, children set sporadic, short-term friendships, changing
frequently their friends: “At the first level, friendship is unstable, they
have friends, but we are the ones trying to unite them by communicating
with them, we talk after lunch on the playground, still their friendship is unstable,
just like if you’d have a cute penholder I’ll be you friend and I’ll talk to
you today, but they break up quite fast” (FG_EC_urban).
The results of the study denote that children deprived of parental care avoid
detailed discussions about their family, including with their friends.
Respondents enlisted the following reasons:
- Unwillingness to divulge family secrets: “I don’t want them to know
what happens in my family”(FG_C_1_urban);
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