Words Matter: Rethinking "orphanhood"

I've been with Helping Children Worldwide for a while now, but in my former life, I was a high school English teacher and a professor of English Education. My plan after college was always to become an English professor, focusing on Shakespeare and writing. Words have always been my first love.  God had another plan for my life.  I still deeply believe in the power of words. As a certain wise wizard once said, "Words are, in my not-so-humble opinion, our most inexhaustible source of magic." So, what does that have to do with HCW's Q2 focus on child welfare, child protection, and family strengthening? Everything. Words shape our understanding, but their meanings can shift across borders and over time.

Take, for example, the word "orphan." About 50 years ago, UNICEF redefined it to include any child who had lost one or both parents. While this may have been intended to bring attention and resources to more vulnerable children, it also created confusion. If you asked the average person today what an orphan is, they’d likely say a child with no parents, or anyone who could care for them, but that's not the actual working definition used by those engaged in global child welfare.  And even if a child has lost both parents, that doesn't automatically mean that they have no one to care for them, as many children are cared for by grandparents, extended family, foster care and adoptive families.  The word "orphan" as defined in this way doesn't illuminate or clarify - it obfuscates.

I experienced this firsthand when I explained UNICEF’s definition to my husband, who lost his father at 15. He looked at me like I was crazy. "I'm an orphan?" he exclaimed. His mother, very much alive and well, raised him and his siblings on her own after her husband passed. He had never considered himself an orphan, and neither did his family.  This revelation frankly made him angry.  It felt to him a little like a cheat designed to raise more money by blurring the definition.  Kind of the opposite of the idea of words as a means to illuminate.

For years, I’ve wrestled with the implications of the word "orphan" and the terms that accompany it. I was especially struck by phrases like "orphan epidemic" and later, during the COVID-19 pandemic, "orphan pandemic." While these terms may help illustrate the scale of suffering, they don’t truly define the issue at hand - they don't point us to the problem (family separation) or the solution (reintegration and family strengthening). The vast majority of children who have lost one or both parents are actually cared for by extended family. Of the approximately 150 million children classified as "orphaned" globally, only about 8 million live in institutional settings—separated from family and parental care.  And yes, this is a cause for concern, and the worthy focus of a lot of our work - but it doesn't point us clearly to the solution.

So, where should our focus be? As my friend and colleague Elli Oswald wisely says, "The solution to orphanhood is not an orphanage." Those words may sound like they belong together, but they don’t. If we accept the premise that "orphanhood" is a problem we must solve, we must recognize that the issue we're really trying to address is one of family separation - and the solution isn't a building—it’s a FAMILY.  Sometimes it seems to me that by placing a child into an orphanage we create "an orphan" (after all, who lives in an orphanage but an orphan?).  But a child reintegrated into a family - their own or an adopted one - is no longer an "orphan."  They're a son or daughter.

If we are facing a crisis, it’s not an orphan crisis—it’s a family separation crisis.  Let's call it what it is, and then set about solving it by reuniting children with families, and by strengthening those families to prevent separation from happening in the first place.
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I don’t want to remove the word "orphan" from our discussions entirely. After all, James 1:27 describes caring for widows and orphans as the purest expression of our faith. But I believe we need to shift our language to reflect the real problem and the real solution. Instead of focusing on "orphanhood," we should be addressing family separation. By strengthening families and preventing separation in the first place, we can move beyond labels and work toward real, lasting change.