The China Foundation for poverty Alleviation(中国扶贫基金会) has started a program to hire and train 100 local women as substitute mothers(替代妈妈) to take care of left-behind children. The three-year program will select 100 villages across Sichuan Province and hire one woman each village.
"It's a model to solve the problem of left-behind children." said Liu Wenkui, Secretary of the foundation. The "substitute mothers" will do parents' job, finding out what the children need and helping them with problems. Each substitute mother will take of about 300 to 500 children. There will be a "children's home" in each village to be the mother's office and children's playing space. Their job will provide quick service, discover the children's problems.
The program hopes to hire women aged 19 to 55 years old from the villages." We want to hire full-time 'mothers' to make sure they won't think about other work," Liu said. "We want local women because they understand local languages and cultures." The program in Sichuan is an experiment, and Liu said," If it is a successful model, we will start it in the whole country."
If parents are forced to leave home to earn a living and unable to take their children with them, we are looking for a transitional(过渡的) way to solve the problem, he added.
