What is Foster Care

According to international practice, foster care consists of entrusting a child to a person or family, other than biological parents, with or without their consent. Family of receipt may be among the extended family or community in which the child belongs. The welcoming family assumes responsibility for raising and educating the foster children. In most cases, the received foster child does not become legally a family member, and still belongs to the family of origin.

Although foster care and custody were considered alternatives to the institutionalization of children's priority, in practice they were and still remain marginal forms. Foster care had a different evolution in developed countries. Differences between countries in the European Union are very high. Thus, out of the total children outside families in Ireland, 73% are in foster care, and the rest in institutional placement, in France are 57% and 12% in Spain, in England, the relation between institutional placement and family is 40 / 60, and in the Netherlands and Denmark the ratio is 50/50.

The essential advantage of the possibility of child placement is to provide a temporary family environment to a child. The essential issue of placement consists in the coexistence of two families responsible for the fate of the same child. In many cases, foster parents come to adopt the children received from the foster agencies. The main preoccupation of any social assistant is to observe and to protect the foster child from any form of abuse and to ensure of his safety and well-being, all necessary factors that contribute to his normal development. Also, the social worker must keep a very tight relationship with the natural parents of the child. They must intervene and explain to the parents what foster care is and they must understand that is a temporary solution until they fix their problems or remove the bad influences of the faulty environment and that they will not be deprived of parental rights.