Jenny Wijntje from the Omgangshuis Foundation in Emmen is proud of the nomination for a Heart House Award from the Het Vergeten Kind Foundation. The award is an encouragement prize that is presented every year during the week of The Forgotten Child. This year the theme is attentive care.
Winning the award was not an option, but Wijntje doesn’t care about that. “I think it’s great that I was nominated.” Together with a number of colleagues, she runs a visitation center, where children of parents who are in the middle of a divorce or children from a foster family receive supervised contact. “It is a nice, quiet place here and we try to convey that. Not in an office, but in a homely setting.”
“For example, this concerns parents who are divorced and whose children still live with the mother. These children are then only allowed to have supervised contact with the father and we offer to do that here in this environment.”
According to Wijntje, they approach things differently at the Omgangshuis in Emmen than at other organizations. “We stand next to and not above the people. In addition, we regularly ignore the existing rules and we are not always appreciated for this. When children come here with parents, we say to the parents: it’s very nice that you think you’re the boss. to be, but that is not the case. The children are the boss here and that is what we focus on. You leave the troubles you have outside the door.”
So the children decide. “If a child comes here and at some point says ‘I don’t like it here at all’ or ‘I don’t like how things are going’, we will talk to the child and then the parent We do this because we believe that a child can very well tell him what he wants and not what adults impose on him.”
The social center goes quite far in this regard, says Wijntje. “For example, if a child is told by a guardianship institution that he has to go to his father and the child is very afraid of his father, we quickly say: ‘we are not going to do that’.” And that is not always appreciated. “So be it, we have to deal with angry parents, because they think they have a right to it, but we see what it does to the child.”
The social center in Emmen has been around for five years. The Child Protection Council, the court and lawyers now know where to find the institution, says Wijntje. “As soon as they get their hands dirty, they come to us. So apparently we are doing something right.”
“We believe that children are not listened to and watched enough. Every child has the right to a father and a mother,” Wijntje concludes. “Even if you are a criminal or a drug addict, it does not mean that you are a bad parent, but that you make bad choices. Children do not see those choices, they see you as the father and mother and not what you have done. .”