1.1. Living in a children's home.

Living in a children’s home can be the best or worst thing that happens to you.

“If you put one badly behaving child into a Christian home where 5 well-behaved children live, will the one person turn out to be good, or will 5 people turn bad?”

I would say that the one turns out to be good. But if you think of it in reverse, I can almost promise you that the only one who is good will turn out to be “bad”.

So, what is the idea of a children’s home? Is it only that society wants us “bad children” away from the streets, or do they really want to help us?

Some of the Finnish children’s home things that don’t make sense:

- If a child tries to run away, workers can’t touch them as soon as the child steps out of the children’s home property. That means that they can't make the child go back to the children’s home if they don't want to.

-If a child has drugs or other illegal substances, the workers mostly can’t take them away because children are hiding them in their underwear (bras, boxers, etc.), and the workers aren’t allowed to touch there at the basic children’s home. 

-If a child runs away, and the workers know for sure where the children are but haven’t seen them or heard their voice, the police can’t come to get the child. And usually, it takes ages before the police get there. If the child is fast or smart enough, they get away. (At the moment in Finland, it is not the police's job even to get the child unless they are dangerous to themselves or others.)  

Why is it so easy for children to bend the rules and behave badly in the children’s home? In the place where I was, they let us smoke cigarettes as underage children because of Finnish law “right to self-determination,” so they were not allowed to take our cigarettes away. Some of the people said that they can’t handle how their hands are so “tightly tied” and don’t even know anymore why they work there. Many of them left the job and started a new career somewhere else.

They couldn’t watch children put themselves into danger all over again, and they couldn’t do anything about it.

 -Light at the end of the tunnel 26.1.2025