ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author alludes a new perception of a "duty of care" on the part of the government towards its youngest citizens enshrined in the provisions of the 1948 Children Act. He suggests that the setting up of the wartime emergency evacuation scheme had been indirectly responsible for this development. The author largely refrains from conjecturing how J. Bowlby and D. Winnicott might have reacted to developments in child provision and thinking and concentrate instead on the context and issues of childcare they actually encountered during their professional careers. Winnicott seems to have sensed that in a British society that felt itself to have been collectively assaulted by ravages of warfare, there were the stirrings of a general concern for its most vulnerable members born in part of a complex of sentiments. Nothing better illustrates the root difference between Bowlby and Winnicott than the former's resolute adherence to the disease model of psychological disorder.
