Fifty years ago the Children Act (1948) created the modern child care service in England and Wales. Then, as now, the preferred form of state-provided care for children was foster, rather than residential, care. However, the nature of foster family care has changed considerably over the past 50 years and, in some respects, so have the children fostered. Then the predominant form of foster care was long-term care, in keeping with the prevailing ideology of “rescuing” children from intolerable home conditions. Now, by contrast, foster care is a much more diverse service, and the commonest form is short-term care, which is generally understood as care intended to last less than roughly 3 months. This is in keeping with a strong ideology in both the U.S.A. and the U.K. that foster care is not parenting, and that almost all children are best off with their biological parents.
