Chiquititas was panned by critics that deemed the program to be oversexualized and having a bad quality. The idea of an orphanage being portrayed as a beautiful place full of pretty, well-dressed white children was also heavily panned. The Season Five ending, where the adult characters were removed from the storyline after an accident, and the children are sent to the Hogar de las Sombras child prison from which they escape, was considered by some reviewers as "anything but ingenious" and too "traumatic" for children, and received criticism for the writer's "incoherence and unjustified cruelty".
