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The paper depicts a pilot study conducted to develop the research design for a larger study and explore the relationships between mental health, emotion regulation techniques, and resilience of destitute children residing at children's homes. The study was explorative and employed purposive sampling to gather data írom 28 destitute children (12-17 years) from two children's homes in Goa, India. Mental Health Battery, Emotion Regulation Questionnaire and Brief Resilience Scale were used for assessment. The findings indicated a positive correlation between mental health and cognitive reappraisal, r-value as 0.48 with a p-value of0.008, and resilience with an rvalue of 0.52 and p-value 0.004, both significant at 0.01 levels. There was no significant correlation between emotion suppression and mental health, but it established a negative relationship. Also, it was evident that around 57.14% of destitute adolescents used emotion suppression to manage emotions.
Keywords: children's home, destitute children, mental health, emotion regulation, resilience
India being a densely populated country also bears the largest child population in the world (UNICEF, 2011) out of which many children are deprived of a family and stable residence. They include children of lower Socio-economic Status, abandoned, have any form of mental or physical impairment or an orphan. The Juvenile Justice Act (2015) defines Child Care Institutions (CCI) as homes, children's home, observation homes, special homes which aim to provide children with care and protection. According to the statistics provided by the Ministry of Women and Child Development of Government of India (2018) the total number of institutionalized care units for children in India are 9,500 and the total number of beneficiaries are 3,70,000. The statistics for Goa suggest that there are around 48 registered institutionalized care units, which consist of 2670 children. Hence, numerous children grow in the absence of parental care and support.
About 50% of the children are admitted to CCI as a result of destitution caused due to extreme poverty which comprises of India's 28.5% of the total population (Alkire et al., 2014). Poverty is a global issue and a state in which the individuals are at a disadvantage, or lack the abilities to provide themselves with the basic necessities. Also, it deprives people of safety and well-being. Thus, it snatches away the fundamentals that aid existence. Poverty is...