Introduction: The Overlooked Truth About Keeping Families Together

Today, on World Children’s Day, we pause to recognise the universal rights owed to every child, from education and health to protection and play. But rights do not exist in a vacuum; they are deeply interconnected. And for most children, the primary vehicle for delivering these rights is the family.

The right to family life is often the linchpin. When a child is separated from their family, it rarely endangers just one right; it risks causing a domino effect that threatens their right to identity, their right to development, and their right to be safe from harm.

Yet, a common assumption persists that family separation is usually a necessary response to abuse or neglect. Reality, however, is often far simpler and more tragic: in the vast majority of cases children are separated from their parents due to the overwhelming pressures of poverty.

The United Nations Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children state unequivocally that financial and material poverty should never be the only justification for the removal of a child from the care of their parents. Instead, it should be seen as an indicator of their need for support.

At the Martin James Foundation, our learning from working with partners in 18 countries has confirmed that direct support to families can be a powerful catalyst for strengthening child protection systems. This post will explore three key takeaways from the work of our partners that demonstrate how small, direct interventions create the ripple effects that can lead to large-scale, sustainable change.

1. It Starts with Trust (and a Holistic View of Family Needs)

Effective family strengthening does not begin with a checklist of services; it begins with building trust. Our partners have found that child-specific solutions may be insufficient because a child’s well-being is inseparable from their family’s stability. As our partner Udayan Care learned, interventions must focus on the family as an entire unit to adequately protect a child.

Udayan Care’s “FiT Families Together” project in Delhi began as an emergency response for children who were rapidly returned to their families from institutions during the COVID-19 lockdown. The team quickly realised that for reintegration to be successful, they needed to support not just the individual child, but their siblings and parents as well.

This insight led to the development of a broader prevention and family strengthening initiative guided by their “Circle of Care and Protection”. This model provides holistic support across ten domains, from basic needs and household finances to mental health and positive parenting, treating the family as an interconnected unit.

The power of this approach is captured in their evidence, which confirms that with timely, coordinated support, families can successfully provide safe and nurturing environments for children who were once institutionalised.

This trust-based, holistic model is also embodied by our partner in Cambodia, This Life, who take a similar approach rooted in deep community listening. Their work is grounded in the principle of listening to communities first. As their team listened, they discovered that the challenges children faced were deeply connected to broader issues within families and communities, which prompted a shift in focus towards family strengthening.

Today, This Life uses a comprehensive, community-centred approach that includes case management, economic strengthening, and psychosocial support to keep families together. In Cambodia, family separation is often driven by a combination of poverty, the desire for better educational opportunities, and the historical disruption of traditional social structures that once provided a robust community safety net.

By addressing root causes like financial instability or lack of legal entitlements, the holistic approach of partners like Udayan Care and This Life resolves problems before they escalate into crises. This proactive support creates its own ripple effect, where a single family stabilised is one less crisis entering the statutory system. It shifts the focus from being reactive, separating a child after a crisis, to being proactive and preventive, supporting a family to avert a crisis in the first place.

2. Local Level Work Provides the ‘How’ for High-Level Policy

International frameworks such as the UN Guidelines for the Alternative Care of Children provide the essential ‘what’ and ‘why’ of care reform, establishing the principles and goals. However, it is often the work of local, civil society partners that can demonstrate the ‘how’, creating the practical, evidence-based models necessary to turn high-level policy into practice.

This dynamic, where practice informs policy, has reached a critical turning point. For years, our partners have been developing the ‘how’; now, political momentum is building, creating demand for proven solutions.

The recent Doha Declaration recognises the family as a central enabler and contributor to social development and recommits the world to strengthening social protection systems. But these commitments remain abstract principles until organisations, including our partners, demonstrate how to translate them into reality.

Initiatives like the Global Charter on Children’s Care Reform galvanise these principles, calling on governments to make specific, measurable commitments to strengthen families and progressively end the use of institutions. When the Global Charter calls for an end to the reliance on institutions, the work of civil society organisations, such as our partners, and committed governments is demonstrating what is possible and necessary in their context.

Likewise, when the Doha Declaration calls for strengthening social protection to combat poverty (what it terms as the “greatest global challenge”), Udayan Care’s work produces a robust set of processes, procedures, and practices, creating a replicable model that can inform programmatic and strategic thinking across India.

This work with communities generates contextually validated evidence that is often more persuasive and actionable for policymakers than externally designed theoretical frameworks. This creates the ultimate ripple effect: a successful local model that can be adapted and scaled, influencing practice far beyond its original community.

3. The Power of One: How a Single Case Can Influence an Entire System

The connection between direct service and systems change is not abstract; it is direct and tangible. A single, well-managed case can expose a systemic weakness and become the catalyst for its reform.

One of our partners developing case management protocols to keep children out of orphanages was assigned the case of a young boy at risk of being placed in an institution. Their investigation revealed an older brother who was willing and eager to care for him but lacked the funds for transportation.

In this instance, a simple bus ticket was all that was needed to prevent this child’s placement into an institution. Critically, this small, precise intervention also proved instrumental in the organisation’s advocacy for gatekeeping services as alternatives to institutionalisation.

This pattern of individual casework contributing to systems change is also mirrored in the work of Udayan Care. Their collaborative, multi-stakeholder approach to supporting individual families facilitated the creation of the Delhi State Network on Family Strengthening, a formal body bringing together government ministries and community organisations, allowing for a coordinated approach to child protection.

Furthermore, by working closely with local Child Welfare Committees (CWCs), the very gatekeepers of the state care system, Udayan Care prevented the reinstitutionalisation of 29 children, directly influencing official practice and decision-making.

These examples prove a vital point about how meaningful change occurs. As we have learned from the achievements of our partners, those doing the work are also the ones shaping the work.

The Family is the Social Net

In a world of vast needs and limited resources, we must focus on what works. One of our partners, working in a country with few formal support mechanisms, perfectly captured the ultimate truth of this work, stating that in the absence of a robust social net, the family is the social net.

While families have served as this primary safety net for centuries, they cannot always sustain the weight of poverty and crisis in isolation. At the Martin James Foundation, we champion the vital interplay between the natural strength of the family and the formal protections created by governments and civil society. We believe these systems should not operate in parallel, but in partnership.

As we look to build more resilient societies, imagine what we could achieve if we started by investing in the foundational social net that already exists: the family. On this World Children’s Day, let us recognise that protecting children starts with protecting their right to family life.

By Ailsa Laxton, Director of Global Programmes at Martin James Foundation