ABSTRACT
This chapter outlines briefly care as a formal construct of a highly regulatory approach to being looked after in the setting of foster care. It focuses on to consider care and its expression within the interdependencies and everyday moral ‘workings out’ between people in caring relationships. The chapter examines the meaning of care in what is often a nebulous mix of paid and unpaid fostering. It deals with a brief reprise of foster care as relational, constitutive and contextual in contrast with care as a professional and regulatory discipline. The chapter argues that it is an ethic of care linked to relationality within a private family setting that provides the single distinctive characteristic of fostering. Foster carers are not substitute parents, but if they fail to act ‘as a parent would’ they are unlikely to provide the sorts of affect and boundaries that are deemed essential to a child’s social and emotional development.
