Cases of child abandonment at youth centres and various charities in Greek capital of Athens have shocked a country where family ties are strong.
In a report by BBC, Father Antonios, a young Orthodox priest who runs a youth centre for the Athens's poor, has found four children on his doorstep - including a baby just days old, in that last couple of months alone.
There are reports of others charities being approached by parents who feel that they are no longer able to look after their children due to poverty.
One such documented case involved a couple whose twin babies were in hospital being treated for malnutrition, because the mother herself was malnourished and unable to breastfeed.
Father Antonios claimed that the issue of parents needing help with supporting their children is not new, and he stated that "Over the last year we have hundreds of cases of parents who want to leave their children with us - they know us and trust us. They say they do not have any money or shelter or food for their kids, so they hope we might be able to provide them with what they need."
However, he also stated that before the crisis, he had not seen children being simply abandoned by their parents.
Many times parents who are not able to provide for their child will feel despair, loneliness and anger. They will also feel an enormous weight of cultural stigma and shame in such a family orientated society.
In many cases children absorb the emotions of their parents, so the child will internalise all the feelings of their parent - particularly guilt.
Children taken into care may also avoid forming a bond with their carers because they are afraid it would be a betrayal of their parent, and might mean their mother or father will not return for them.
Therefore, when they get older, they are likely to have problems with trust and that will manifest itself in difficulties with relationships.
SOS Children's Villages' Greece director of social work, Stergios Sifnyos, says the charity is not accustomed to taking children from families for economic reasons and does not want to.
In the past when SOS Children's Villages took children into its care, the cause was mostly drug and alcohol addiction in the family. Now the main factor is poverty.
Sifnyos states that despite economic uncertainty, “the truth is that the biggest need any child has is to feel the love of its parents.”