No place like home

The Children Act 1948 emphasizes foster care as the alternative provision for children who cannot be cared for by their own families; it also underlines the responsibility of the state to provide good alternative homes where necessary. The Act reflects contemporary developments in psychological thinking about the importance of attachment relationships, and a recognition, derived in part from the experiences of evacuation, of the harmful effects on children of separation from their families. However, greater awareness, from the 1970s on, of the deficiencies of the state as parent and the complexity of relationships between children, their birth parents and foster families led to the promulgation of ‘inclusive’ and ‘task‐centred’ models of foster care, reflected in the shift of nomenclature from foster ‘parenting’ to foster ‘caring’. These approaches may, however, be in danger of minimizing both the attachment needs of many children and young people within the foster placement and the parenting role which is appropriate in many placements. A model of foster care, derived directly from the first Children Act, which stresses these core relationships, should be developed alongside that which emphasizes task‐centred, time‐limited provision

Developmental psychology · Foster care · Political science · Promulgation · State (computer science · Task (project management · Child Welfare and Adoption · Law · Medicine · Nursing · Psychology