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Turkish children in the second grade at primary school who were either living with parents or living in an orphanage were surveyed using the Hopelessness Scale for Children (Beck, 1974) to assess their feelings of hopelessness. Participants were 130 students (66 girls and 64 boys) living in the province of Erzurum, Turkey. When data were analyzed the findings showed that the hopelessness level of children living in an orphanage was significantly higher than that of children living with their parents.
Keywords: hopelessness, orphanage, children.
The basic condition required for a child to develop a healthy personality is the presence of a warm environment providing her/him with love, support, and understanding.
In her research on the effects on children of divorce and mother's absence Bilen (2004) reported that divorce or the mother's death during the early childhood years disturb the child and a sense of hopelessness becomes more intense compared with when the child's parents divorce or the mother dies when the child is older.
Kihççi (1992) reported that children who live in an orphanage experience feelings of fear, despair, and insecurity, and stressed that anxiety levels in these children were much higher than anxiety levels of children who were living with their parents. BiyikU (1982) found that children living in orphanages were behind their peers in terms of mental development, integration, socialization, responsibility, language development, and independent activities compared to chUdren Uving with their parents. He also emphasized that this backwardness in the general development of children growing up in orphanages results from their spending the first years of Ufe loveless and that Uving conditions in the orphanages reinforce these negativities. Undoubtedly changes in family structure, divorce, and famiUes being fragmented or scattered are factors that affect children's psychological development to various degrees. Day by day, in Turkey the number of children is increasing for whom adequate care and support is not being provided, such as children who are bom out of wedlock or whose parents die or desert mem when the children are very young or where the chUd's family Uves in adverse social or cultural conditions (Koçkesen, 1992).
Many studies have been conducted in which researchers have examined the effects that parental absence has on a child. The death of parents has...