1. INTRODUCTION

Over the past few years, people who grew up in foster care, or in children’s homes, in England and Scotland have demanded root-and-branch reforms of the care system, and have asked for love to be at the core of the system. Although ‘love’ cannot be legislated, this is a legitimate demand, given the importance of love for human well-being. It is, therefore, important to investigate how policy and practice in children’s social care can respond. This chapter draws on moral philosophy to argue that love is a matter of justice and, therefore, a duty. It proposes that, at minimum, children in care should receive attentive love, and that children’s rights can serve as proxies for them to have similar opportunities to become ‘lovable’ as children raised by their parents.

Parental love is the strongest human bond, and the source for children to develop attachment, self-trust and autonomy. Experiencing love is essential for a child’s development. A child’s bond with their mother, father or primary carer will give the child the confidence to experience and express needs and feelings: ‘the psychological precondition for the development of all further attitudes of self-respect’. Children taken into care are often deprived of this essential experience and, recently, young people who grew up in care in several countries have demanded that love be at the heart of the care system. What children do not lose when they enter care is their rights. In exercising its duty of care, the State should ensure that care provides an environment in which children can exercise their rights.

McGillivray holds that rights are about love, because they allow autonomy to flourish. In this chapter, I will argue that children’s rights can provide the scaffold for normalising care experience, and that careful implementation of Article 12 of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child 1989 (UNCRC) can serve as a proxy for love, for children who are raised by families other than their birth families, or children raised in residential care.