ABSTRACT

Residential care for children has increasingly become a residual service in which both workers and children may feel devalued and demoralized. Over the past decade social policy has made a priority of keeping children in their family of origin, or providing them with a substitute family through fostering or adoption. Residential homes have been maintained only as a last resort for children who cannot be sustained in either natural or substitute families. These are often adolescents with ‘challenging’ styles of behaviour, or other children with ‘special needs’. As the overwhelming majority of child care workers, women are expected to play a range of contradictory roles in relation to children in their care. They are expected to act as surrogate mothers, nurturing and caring for children, and also, to act on behalf of society as ‘father figures’, as a source of discipline and authority over children defined as ‘difficult’. Yet, as residential care has become a service of last resort, it has been starved of the resources required to provide the level of care necessary for the needs of the children involved.