Far from Children's Home : informal Adoptions and Family Group Homes in the Child Care System in the People's Republic of Poland"

The article aims to analyze social practices that go beyond the centralized system of care for orphans in the postwar Poland symbolized by an overcrowded children’s home of the late somunist era. I will focuse on two different phenomena, specific for two different periods of the People’s Republic of Poland, which are on the borderline of the institutionalized caring practices prevailing at that time. Informal adoption (so-called dochowańcy) in the countryside is an example of phenomena that eludes almost completely the systematic control of the state and deviates from those promoted then as modern educational models. The second phenomenon are the family group homes (rodzinne domy dziecka), the hybrid of the family and institutional care facilities, which were supposed to be a cure for psychological and pedagogical problems related to the child’s long-term stay in a care institutions. The interpretive framework will be the concept of borderline, which allows to draw attention to the unobvious relationship of the above-mentioned bottom-up social practices with the central care management system in Poland. Despite different genesis, both phenomena constitute an important borderline of the care system and a permanent reference point for dominant patterns. In the first case, the borderline is based on the clash of modernity determined by the rights of the child (including, above all, the right to education and personal development) with traditional valuesand needs of the rural community. Family homes are in turn an example of the interpenetration of modernity understood in terms of professionalization and bureaucratization of the late communist period with a traditional image of the ideal large family.