ABSTRACT
Child care workers are those persons who provide a major portion of round-the-c1ock care, supervision, and resources for children or youths in a group-Iife situation, whether for day care or residential care. They become the extension of the children 's parents, by assuming immediate responsibility for nurturing care, socialization, and specific therapeutic requirements. The group situation is a socially engineered alternative to family Iiving in which the child care worker functions as the instrumental leader. Child care workers then are both the children's link with the tasks be fore them and the world around them and society's guardians of the quality and direction of the care afforded to the children. Of all the staff working in child welfare settings, child care workers are most directly involved in the children 's Iives, in the latter's continuous encounters with the everyday issues of life as weil as the variations created by the particular group-care program.
