MELO, C. A. Percepção de família em crianças abrigadas [Perception family of sheltered children]. Master’s Dissertation – Universidade Metodista de São Paulo. São Bernardo do Campo (SP), 2011.
Family is the essential foundation to develop a healthy personality. Positive affection provides the child the capacity of creating new relationships, developing self-esteem, selfreliance, tolerating frustration and overcoming anguish. However, many children do not have this opportunity, due to many reasons; for instance, maltreatments, abandonment, negligence; sexual and physical abuses, and orphanhood. Children’s shelters exist to assure their fundamental rights until they return to their original family or are forwarded for adoption. This work proposes to investigate the perception of family from children who live in shelters, identifying the main conflicts and idealization of introjection paternal figures. It was a qualitative research conducted by clinical method. Four children, from 08 to 10 years old, from a shelter located in São Paulo, participated in this study. The procedures used were Drawing-of-Family-and-Story Procedure, observation, open interviews and data provided by the institution. The results show that although they are separated from their families, the children have internalized the paternal figures and harbour ambivalent feelings in relation to the identification established with these objects. However, it was also identified with the presence of lovely impulses. Thus, the importance of shelters is highlighted in the life of these children, in order to offer the same opportunity to feel love, welcomed and cared for, thereby developing the capacity to love and establishing affective ties with other people. The results shown are restricted only for these four children samples, not having the pretension to generalize the perception of family for all shelter children.