Over the past 20 years, the number of people wishing to adopt a child in Belarus has quadrupled.
Belarusians have also begun to adopt children with disabilities more often.
BELTA reports this with reference to the director of the National Adoption Center of the Ministry of Education Tatyana Belevich.
How Belarusians Adopt Children
As the head of the center said, currently over 7,000 children live in families of almost 5.5 thousand adoptive parents.
There are approximately 5,000 children in the republican database of orphans available for adoption.
Every year 300-400 children are adopted, this figure is quite stable.
However, over the past 20 years, the number of applicants has quadrupled. Every year, about 300 citizens and couples are registered as candidates for adoption.
According to Belevich, the worldview of adoptive parents is also changing. Thus, fewer and fewer adoptive parents try to keep the secret of adoption, which is extremely important for the child.
Belarusians have also begun to adopt children with disabilities and special psychophysical development features more often. Over the past 8 years, the number of such children has increased sixfold.
Professional forms of family placement (foster families, family-type children's homes) have also undergone positive changes.
If at the end of the 1990s there were only 11 family-type orphanages in the country, now there are more than 280. They are raising 1.8 thousand children.
There are currently about 1.3 thousand foster families, with almost 2.5 thousand children living in them.
