The Well-Being of Kenyan Children Reunified With Family After Living in Residential Care Institutions

Abstract

About 5.4 million children worldwide live in residential care institutions (also known as “orphanages”), including an estimated 60,000 in Kenya alone (Desmond et al., 2020). Estimates suggest 80% of children in orphanages globally have at least one living parent (Berens & Nelson, 2015; Csáky, 2009; Petrowski et al., 2017), and human rights principles (United Nations General Assembly, 2010) have motivated the Kenyan government to carry out “care reform,” reducing reliance on residential care and prioritizing family-based care for vulnerable children. In this context, many children have reunified with their families after living in residential care. The aim of this dissertation is to examine the experiences and well-being of such children. The first study uses qualitative methods to explore how Kenyan children and young adults who previously lived in residential care describe their lives in residential care and after leaving it. The second study describes the development of a quantitative measure of subject well-being tailored to the priorities of young people who have lived in residential care, and includes an exploratory factor analysis to determine the factor structure of the measure. The third paper uses multivariate analyses to examine how Kenyan reunified children’s subjective well-being may statistically relate to child characteristics, including disability status, when controlling for child gender, age, and time since family reunification. Specifically, I hypothesize that having a disability will be associated with worse subjective well-being and more negative experiences of reunification than children without disabilities. Together, these three studies are designed to address gaps in existing knowledge related to successful transitions of children from residential care into families in Kenya, suggesting promising practices for social workers overseeing children’s reunifications and future directions for research on this population.