Hidden Figures : A House But No Home

Imagine living in a house with 50 of your siblings: the constant noise and chaos as you try to juggle school work, help look after the youngsters, and desperately scramble to gain any ounce of affection from your parents. Your mother doesn’t sing to you or read you bedtime stories. You’re starving for attention, but she’s too consumed with the endless task of trying to clothe and feed you all to cater to your emotional needs.

So, you don’t go to piano lessons, no one attends your parent meetings, and in a house of so many, you feel completely alone.

This is not a purely hypothetical situation.

Imagine now the same environment, except the other children you live with are not really your siblings. Your true mother lives far away, and you haven’t seen her in years. This may be a house, but it is hardly a home, and it is the fate that awaits many children in institutionalised care.

According to official reports, Thailand has 545 documented children’s homes. However, what is written on paper does not always tell the whole story. There are children in the margins, pages lost or torn out, or perhaps never written at all. Our investigation set out to learn about the stories and lives of these children, but we found that few are ever told.

One Sky Foundation was the first chapter in our quest to uncover these missing pages. As part of the Alternative Care Thailand (ACT) coalition, they have been tirelessly surveying and collecting data on unregistered children’s homes across the country. Here, we spoke to Andy Lillicrap, the consultant, and Wiwat Thanapanyaworakun, the manager. Their independent research has illuminated the gaps in official records, allowing us to see where the untold stories lie.

Here, we saw the truth begin to emerge: these documented children’s homes account for less than half of all orphanages in Thailand.

The amount of undocumented children's homes in Thailand is alarming. However, with government oversight leaving much of the picture obscured, the exact figure is still unknown.

According to a study funded by ACT, there are 175 private children’s homes in Chiang Mai alone.

Andy recounted a time he, Wiwat and his team offered to work with the head of social services in Chiang Rai. She refused their offer of help on the basis that she knew how many children’s homes were in her province. According to her findings, there were 37 children’s homes registered with her and 13 not yet registered. After four months, One Sky Foundation completed their survey and found a total of 197 children’s homes in the province—only 37 were legal.

No government oversight means no regulation. There are no enforced requirements for transparency, collaboration with social workers, or childcare standards. As a result, the children are overlooked, as is their safety and welfare. Neither the public nor the government knows what happens to these children behind closed doors, and some children’s shelters refuse to say (32 private children’s homes in Chiang Mai declined to be interviewed by ACT) and due to their status, they have no legal requirement to do so.

This begs the question: “How many children are living outside of any regulation, any monitoring, and who are these people?”

The overcrowded house mentioned earlier is not an anomaly but a direct result of persistent oversight. With proper government funding, more staff could be hired and trained to resolve the large child-to-caretaker ratios and the incompetency too often rife in such institutionalised care systems. The funding for unregistered private homes comes mostly from charitable donations, which often do not suffice to provide for the children.

Several unregistered homes have admitted they don’t have the adequate funds to give children a proper life. In addition, several lack understanding of how to efficiently use these donations. A children's home we visited in San Sai, Chiang Mai, had children sleeping twenty to a room without privacy or a bathroom door, the floorboards rotting away. When asked how they would utilize the extra money required from the public, the manager answered, "Buy a bigger van."

A further issue is that children are needlessly ushered into these systems. Worldwide, there are cases of children being taken into care, but Thailand sees a disproportionate figure. Western countries view this as a last resort for a few youths who either don't have parents or whose parents are abusive or neglectful. In Thailand, the same could be assumed. However, there are no less than 120,000 children in institutionalized care across the country, 97% of whom have at least one living parent, compared to in the West where this figure is 80%. According to Andy and Wiwat, most of these children could, and should, be living with their parents instead.

Wiwat and his team spent two years surveying Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai province. As of today, they have visited, interviewed, and documented just under 400 children’s homes in these two provinces alone.

“There is nowhere else in the world like this… We don’t have a war, we don’t have an HIV epidemic. Why are there 20,000 children living in 400 private children’s homes, most of which are not registered with the government? No one checks on them,”—this is Andy and Wiwat’s main question they have for Northern Thailand.

Why, then, if not from abuse or being orphaned, are so many children in institutional care? The answer lies in poverty and lack of access to education. The Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC) says children should never be separated from their parents for these reasons, but in Thailand, somehow, this has become the standard.

1.4% of the Thai population is Christian, compared to 89% of children’s homes in Chiang Mai. Many were set up by foreign missionaries with the support of their churches, a process made quite easy by the lack of government regulation. U.S. Christians, in particular, continue to create, donate to, and volunteer at such children’s homes without being aware of the reality of the situations or the ramifications of their support.

As Andy put it, “When we hear a child is in a children’s home, we assume they're there because something went wrong. We don’t ask. It's surprising how we don’t ask.”

Though such children’s homes are often created out of good intention, the ignorance of participants often does the children more harm than good. Andy spoke of the misinformation surrounding Thailand that affects the mindset of missionaries, volunteers, and churches: “People paint a very dark picture of Thailand, and people want to come here and be the light—to rescue the children. Missionaries come here believing they’re gonna kick down the doors of brothels and rescue girls.” In reality, they are breaking up families and taking children from their homes.

At least half of these Christian children's homes are unregistered, unregulated, and operating without accountability, yet they still offer their charitable services to help relieve impoverished parents of the financial burden of raising their children. In some cases, these children’s homes act as a tool to bring children to Christianity: children pray every day, go to church on Sundays, and Bible study is a common practice. This is not coming from the standpoint of child rights or social work; some people who run such children’s homes have even been reported as referring to them as a ‘holy place spreading the word of Jesus.’ A child should not grow up in such an environment where Christianity comes first, where child welfare is an afterthought.

“We’re looking at about 40 million dollars a year to run those (Christian) children’s homes, largely coming from the US churches. And what are the people in those churches told about the situation here and the children here, and how accurate is it? …And do they have any notion that most of those children should be with their parents? And those 40 million dollars could be used to make that happen?” questions Andy.

90% of the children in these children’s homes would have a better life if they could have home support, according to ACT’s findings. These families should have the opportunity for support to be brought to them rather than their only option being to have their children taken away and placed into a children's home.

If parents had the choice, they wouldn’t give up their children. Many families cry as they do so, but there is only one choice in Thailand. As Andy Added, “Why are those people not saying (to the families), ‘I can see things are really tough for you. How can I help you?’ Why are they saying, ‘I can take your kids’?”

It’s an offer hard to refuse for many parents. Their decision is made out of desperation, underpinned by poverty. Millions of people are living below the poverty line, having to work day and night, every day of the week, for 3000 baht a month to feed their family on. And then, as Andy put it, "someone comes along and says, 'You could give me your kids. I’ll give them three meals, I’ll make sure they’re neat and tidy, they’ll have new clothes; maybe, if they’re smart, we’ll get them into university. What do you think? But you need to decide now.'" What choice should they make?

Poor families often believe institutional care can present their children with the provisions they cannot—namely, access to education, adequate food, and shelter. In truth, while children in institutional care may receive basic necessities, they are frequently exposed to conditions detrimental to their health and well-being. These include mental health conditions, developmental delays, and the risk of abuse.

“We can’t let them do whatever they want, whenever they want... In the UK and Australia, you can’t just open a children's home because you want to, and expect the police and social services not to come ask you what you’re doing. But in Thailand, you can. You can rent a house in Chiang Mai tomorrow, you can find someone to take you to some poor villages, and in under a week, you can have 30 kids. Then you can get a website and you can start raising money. Nobody is coming to ask you who you are and what you’re doing and why you’re doing it." Andy said.

During our investigation, we visited a handful of orphanages located in Chiang Mai and were often left feeling concerned by the lack of psychological support and emotional care for children. Due to the overcrowded nature of large institutional care, children frequently do not receive adequate attention. Without real affection from a parental figure, children in institutional care can develop attachment disorders.

"Their development is also often stunted, which has been linked to a dramatic decrease in brain activity compared to children who grew up outside of institutional care," Dr. Netdao Yangyubon, head of the Child and Youth Management Unit Evaluation Project, explained.

As a result of these mental delays, many children who are taken from their families in exchange for education never even get to see the walls of a university classroom.

Furthermore, Dr. Netdao added, "Children's homes cannot solely rely on their way of management; they must also take into account the environment and culture of the community where these children live."

Often, these children are from hill tribes and ethnic minority groups. Having been separated from their communities at an early age, they return to their families to find they have lost their culture and are unable to speak their mother tongue, due to having been taught only in Thai. Wiwat recalled a story of a young boy who was given up as a newborn after the death of his mother: “Fifteen years later, they meet up. But two people, the father and the son, cannot talk to each other because the son cannot speak (the) local language, (and) the father cannot speak Thai.” This is a common experience for many children who grew up in the system. Wiwat and Andy told us of villages they visited, only to find all the children missing. Taking the children away from these communities results in “identity loss, loss of culture, loss of language, (and) loss of roots.”

Too many children’s homes are unaware of this issue. They only see what’s on the surface. As Wiwat told us, in children’s homes, you can see that the children have “better food, better living conditions, a clean room, a clean bed,” but what they cannot see at that time is arguably more important: the mental state of the child and their relationships in the long term. “When children live in the children’s home for 10 years, what happens after? The children’s homes, they don’t see (these problems). They say, ‘Okay, you are better. You are better compared to your family on the hill tribe.’” They don’t see the damage that could happen in the relationship “between the children and the family. (When) the children have lost their roots, it’s difficult to go back to the culture.”

Wiwat referenced Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: the two basic needs are about survival — you have food, accommodation, and safety. The third level is “feeling that you belong to someone.” Although children’s homes can meet the first two requirements, they rarely respond to children’s needs at the higher level. Children require quality time with their parents every day: at least thirty minutes of doing homework together or sharing stories, just them. In a home of fifty children and three staff, how is this achievable? How can one caretaker look after the emotional and mental needs of twenty children in a day?

Many children Wiwat and his team interviewed admitted to feeling quite lonely. “They are in a lot of pain... When they come back from school, they have something inside them they want to explore, to have someone to share things with, but they have no one to listen to them... (because their routine is just that): they come back (from school), do their homework, clean up, go to the church play, and then sleep... and then many children, when they leave, have problems in life after that. The children’s homes, they never see this problem.”

There have also been reports of child abuse in institutional care. Instances have been relayed to us of inhumane punishment techniques being used on young children such as forcing them to eat chili peppers or stand outside in the sun for prolonged periods of time.

To open a children’s shelter, the regulations focus on infrastructure, but there is no emphasis on why the children are there, or how it was deemed necessary for them to be there. In addition, “To register your private children’s home in Chiang Mai, you don't actually need a child protection policy; it is not one of the requirements. You don't have to train your staff. You don’t have to show any evidence that you did background checks on your staff... All the things that would seem like common sense are not part of the requirements to open a home.”, Andy said. As a result, there are many registered children’s homes with standards even lower than some illegal ones.

As the Children's Shelter Foundation manager explained, “Staff are crucial to a children’s home. If they are not trained adequately or mistreated, they may pass on their frustration to the children.” The manager highlighted the unique challenges faced by orphanages in Thailand and emphasized the foundation's commitment to exceeding government standards by ensuring staff are well-trained and supported.

Following the Parenting for Long-Life Health (PLH) program guidelines—developed by the World Health Organization (WHO)—Children's Shelter Foundation engages caregivers in building positive parenting skills, improving parent-child relationships, and reducing harsh disciplinary practices. They also employ an on-site child psychologist to provide emotional support for children during their stay and as they transition into adulthood. This is a focus that shouldn’t be the exception, but should be mandatory for all children’s shelters across Thailand, whether registered or not.

However, in many of the orphanages we visited, such practices were not in place.

While no country has a flawless system of social care for children, Thailand stands in stark contrast to other nations that have agreed to follow the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC)—despite being one of the first to sign it.

The CRC establishes clear guidelines: children should only be separated from their families as a last resort, and the decision should never rest with a children's home, where a clear conflict of interest exists. As we know, Thailand is not following this protocol.

In countries like Australia and the UK, only a judge has the authority to determine a child's placement. These countries also prioritize family-based care. A 2021 Ofsted report revealed that in England and Wales, Out of the 400,00 children in social care, 320,000 children are in home-based care, living with their families with the help of a social worker and an individual care plan. In Thailand, this figure is zero. In addition, in the UK 10,00 children are living in residential care as opposed to Thailand’s 120,000. The UK and Thailand are countries of a similar population size with a similar amount of children and they have both signed the CRC. So why are these figures so starkly different?

This is affecting more than just the children, it is affecting the communities. Villages are filled with parents and grandparents but the newest generation is missing. There is no-one for these people to pass down their knowledge, culture or language to. Taking the children away from these communities is not solving the issue, it is just creating more problems.

In Andy’s words, “If the solution is when there’s a problem we take children into our care, after 30 years will we have a stronger community or a weaker community?...Can the communities solve problems by themselves? Do they have resilience? No, because everytime there’s a problem, we just take the problem away. If for 30 years, we’d been doing the social work, the really hard work in the community to build resilience, to build strength, where would we be now? We could have less children’s homes.”

A strong future cannot be built on weak foundations. Culture cannot thrive when there’s nothing left to be shared and no-one left to share it with. In order to provide support, one must engage in research and call for transparency rather than run into the fight blindly. These children don't need salvation, they need a childhood.  They cannot afford to have their stories unwritten any longer.

The government must take action, working alongside the public to ensure that children grow up in nurturing, safe, and caring environments that meet state-sanctioned guidelines. Children’s homes must rise to their intended purpose—not just shelters, but sanctuaries, true homes.

This can be achieved through consistent monitoring and documentation of all children’s care homes. ACT is advocating for policies that prioritize family-based care, ensuring that children are only separated from their families as a last resort. They also emphasise that children should be assigned to care systems only by independent and informed third-parties. Thailand was one of the first countries to sign the CRC—these commitments must not remain words on paper. The government has the resources and solutions before them; they need only act.

The public too must play their part. Change cannot come from blindly donating to orphanages they have never visited. Governments and NGOs cannot achieve these changes alone. People must ask the hard questions. They must be aware, understand, and focus their attention on this issue. The power to create change lies with us. And it is up to us to ensure that these children don’t just have a house—they have a home.

Story written by Kavin Pramesiripaisan & Arianwen Grifffiths