For several years now, children from Hungary have been adopted in the Netherlands through the Dutch Adoption Foundation (NAS). In order to get a better picture of this adoptive country, two employees of the Adoption Services, Zindzi Folmer and Annemarie Vernooij, traveled to Hungary in the spring of 2016 to take a look at homes and schools. In this article, they describe some of the information they gathered along the way on their work trip.
During our stay in Hungary we visited, among other things, the child protection services in various provinces and the Central Authority in Budapest. We also visited a children's home and met a foster family.
Reception within the province
The entire system of child protection, adoption, foster care and guardianship matters is provincially regulated in Hungary. There are nineteen provinces. If a child is placed out of home, it is first taken care of in foster care within the province. Even if the child later qualifies for adoption, adoptive parents are initially sought within this province before a nationwide search is made for suitable parents. An advantage of this system is that child protection officers personally know all the children in their province, as well as the foster parents and prospective adoptive parents in the area. Matching is therefore not only based on a paper file, but also on the basis of personal contact.
In Hungary, the stability of the living environment of children is of paramount importance. Children stay in the same place for a long time and ideally do not experience transfers after the out-of-home placement until they go back to the biological family or are adopted. If this is not possible due to an extra care need (for example because a specialist lives too far away), this will be deviated from. But the policy is that children stay in one place and, in principle, always with a foster family. Many children who are adopted are therefore first able to build a bond with their foster parents.