ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that public care needs to move its instrumental focus to articulate a broader ontological purpose, informed by what is required to promote children’s growth and flourishing. It explores some of the central features of caring in the lifespace and shows that residential child care is best considered to be a practical/moral endeavour rather than the technical/rational one it has become. The chapter describes morally active, reflexive practitioners and containing environments. It suggests that care ethics provide a useful heuristic both to critique the state of contemporary residential child care and to reconceptualise it by stressing the centrality of reciprocal and interdependent relationships in the creation of environments that foster children’s growth and flourishing. Children in residential care are increasingly constructed as being ‘a risk’ or ‘at risk’. Workers in residential child care are required to become involved in effective practices of care.
