Residential childcare: A new educational perspective

In this article we discuss the possibility to consider residential childcare context -just like other families characterized by the absence of biological generativity - as a family group, an educating family, when meaningful caregivers in a professional context guerantee parental functions to those children and adolescents who canot have the opportunity to stay in their family of origin bacause of situations of deprivation, neglect or abuse. To define "residential childcare" as a "family" implies the assumption of an interpretative perspective whereby we consider all the family pluralities existing today, structured by the discontinuity between generativity, parenthood, conjugality,, and other variables, whose interconnection deconstructs the traditional ideas of "natural" family (Fruggeri, 2007). In the light of these reflections, we can appreciate the complexity of the chalenges which residential childcare is called upon to deal with, by configuring itself as one of the possible type of family.