ABSTRACT
A child’s home is often easy to spot by the group of teenagers hanging around the doorstep of a particular house or building. Many are in residential care whilst waiting for foster placements or to return home if things can be sorted out. For many, residential care is a stopover after many previous failed placements before moving on to some other living arrangements—another foster home, bed and breakfast or boarding school for example. In residential homes, the staff team and managers will be confronted by raw, emotional states of the most painful and distressing kind from not just one but many of the children and adolescents in their care. Menzies Lyth has written about the operation of social defences in residential care establishments in her paper “The Development of the Self of Children in Institutions”. In residential homes, the parental figures to whom the children and adolescents turn for containment are the care staff and managers.
