Social orphan  Social orphan is a term in various foreign languages, such as Ukrainian, denoting that a child has no adults looking after it, even though one or more parents are still alive. Usually the parents are alcoholics, drug abusers, or simply are not interested in the child. It is therefore not the same as an orphan, who has no living parents. The Convention on the Rights of the Child has brought many countries to reassess their mandate to care for children inside their borders thus bringing to light various new ways of thinking about international child care. In a study of Honduras it was found that 54.3% of children commonly identified as "orphans" were actually social orphans.