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The aim of this chapter is to draw attention to the meaning of social workers’ conduct of care practices with young children living in residential child protection institutions. I am interested in identifying what good care practices may be, and to unfold how these practices could be understood as realizations of CRC Article 3, on the best interest of the child. Through observations and articulations of what social workers do when they provide care for children in residential institutions, I attempt to show that good care practices for young children have a lot to do with the social worker’s willingness to engage in sensitive, responsible and embodied interactions with the children. These embodied care practices, which I call good care practices, rest on an ethics of proximity or care ethics that is intimately connected with the realization of the child’s best interest. I see this as a part of social workers’ professionalism that is seldom articulated in a rights-based context.

This chapter focuses on CRC Article 12, as this pertains to foster children. In addition to participation rights all children share, foster children have a set of administrative participation rights related to their case. On their part, foster parents have to share their parental authority with persons of authority outside of the family who are obliged to follow up on foster children’s formal participation rights. On the other hand, children’s participation in everyday decision-making is an integral part of family life. The question is what challenges may occur when these participatory rights have to interact. I argue that three points may prevent problems resulting from these issues: (1) children in the foster home must be involved by Child Protection Services; (2) foster parents must be allowed to exercise sufficient parental authority despite being a public family; (3) children’s participation must be understood as a relational phenomenon.

The purpose of this book has been to critically explore what child protection policy and professional practice entail if they claim to abide by a human rights standard in order to be justified. To achieve this aim, contributions were commissioned that addressed the question of rights-based, professional child protection work at three levels: the systems level, the policy level and through examples from child protection practices.