Family care is strengthened by building on what already exists
Across Indonesia, family networks, community support, and emerging local efforts provide important foundations for children to grow up in families. This page highlights strengths and developments that help make family care possible.
Family and Community Support
Extended Family and Kinship Care
Children are often supported not only by parents, but also by grandparents, aunts, uncles, and wider family networks. These relationships can provide care and stability during hardship.
Family care has long been part of Indonesian life. Many longstanding social and cultural strengths have helped support children within families and communities for generations.
Mutual Support and Community Care
Traditions such as gotong royong (mutual cooperation) reflect shared responsibility and mutual support that can help strengthen families, communities, and the care children receive.
Family Belonging
Family connection and belonging help support identity, stability, and nurturing relationships, providing important foundations for children growing up in families.
Strengths that endure.
These enduring strengths—family, community, compassion, and belonging—continue to provide important foundations for children to grow up in families.
Faith and Community-Based Compassion
Religious communities often support vulnerable children and families through longstanding traditions of compassion, service, and care for one another.
Why These Strengths Matter
Research and experience around the world continue to show that children often thrive best when they can remain connected to family, culture, and community whenever it is safe and possible.
By recognizing and strengthening existing supports, communities can create more opportunities for children to grow up with stability, belonging, and lasting relationships.
Indonesia's Commitment to Family-Based Care
Indonesia's commitment to family-based care extends beyond cultural traditions and community values. Over the past two decades, the government has increasingly recognized that children thrive best when they can remain in safe, loving family environments.
This commitment is reflected in national child welfare laws and in the National Standards of Child Care (Standar Nasional Pengasuhan Anak or SNPA), which affirm that children should be raised by their families whenever possible and that separation should occur only when necessary for a child's safety and well-being. The standards emphasize that poverty alone should not be a reason for a child to enter residential care and that every effort should be made to strengthen and support families before separation occurs.
The standards also redefine the role of child care institutions. Rather than serving as permanent solutions, residential care is intended to be a temporary and last-resort response while families are strengthened, reunification is explored, or other family-based options are identified. Child care organizations are encouraged not only to care for children, but also to support families and communities so that children can remain connected to those who know and love them.
These reforms demonstrate that family-based care is not simply an international idea applied to Indonesia. It is a direction that Indonesia itself has chosen through its laws, policies, and child welfare standards.
Learn More
Download the SNPA Frequently Asked Questions Handbook (Bahasa Indonesia), published by Indonesia's Ministry of Social Affairs in partnership with Save the Children.