Romania
The consequences of institutionalization on a youth’s personality
According to the studies carried out, the personality of the youth who has experienced institutionalization undergoes progressive changes, the feeling of his identity and the way of perceiving the other changing simultaneously. Every person’s self is evolving within the limits of an institutionalized system. He/she feels dependent on the institution and identifies him/herself with it, with the colleagues and the personnel working in the institution.
Children fulfill their needs for communication and affectivity especially within their family. Because of the alert rhythm of every day life, the communication between children and parents is seriously affected. This problem becomes even more serious when we talk about institutionalized children, in whose case the relationship child-parent cannot be totally substituted by the relationship with the educators. The consequence is the high probability that adjustment and mental development difficulties appear, which may lead to the manifestation of aggressive tendencies and emotional and behavioral disturbances. These difficulties of psychological nature are supplemented by the fact that people characterize these youths as being “from the children’s home”.
The youth interiorizes the stigma and behaves according to his “denigrators’” expectations. As long as the youth is part of a collectivity, he/she is a usual, normal person, but the information that he/she “comes from the children’s home” causes defamation, being conferred with various attributes – weakness, emotional handicap, lack of responsibility, and also the idea of native criminal personality.
Under these circumstances, negativity seems to dominate the post-institutionalized youths’ personality, who assess themselves after experiencing a failure as being unable, incompetent, incapable to overcome an obstacle. At the same time, these youths often have unrealistic goals, which do not match their personal abilities. The fear to overcome their condition, the fear of an imaginary social stigma, the lack of self-confidence, may lead to underestimation. In return, the lack of responsibility, the overprotective environment in which they developed make the youths aspire to a social status and a profession they cannot deal with.
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