ABSTRACT
PSYCHOLOGISTS tell US that a happy family life in which thechild both gives and receives affection, feels secure, and hashis own accepted status and significance, is the most important of his needs, more important even than a high standard of physical care, and studies of delinquency and deprivation among young people have emphasised the serious effects which separation from his family, real or believed rejection by it, or embittered relations within it, may have on his mental and emotional development.! Consequently the community has a special responsibility for seeing that those children who have no homes, or who, for some reason cannot be allowed to remain in their own homes, receive imaginative and loving alternative care, and that the numbers of such children are kept as low as possible.
