ABSTRACT
Most adopted children are permanently deprived of their natural parents’ care, but otherwise lead a normal home life in a family setting. Children with common problems, and from similar home circumstances, can still be found in different administrative pigeon holes, having arrived there by a variety of different routes. Several departments of local and central government and numerous voluntary bodies are concerned with problems of child care that are frequently alike, and sometimes identical. If all the means of providing substitute care for children who are the victims of family failure are seen as comparable and, to some extent, interchangeable they can be added together to see what patterns exist. With this aim in mind an estimate was made of the total child care problem in each county and county borough in England and Wales in 1960.
