There are three main reasons why children go into care.
Poverty and the problems it spawns - such as indequate housing, depression, drug addiction and alcohol misuse - is one of the most important root causes of family breakdown.
Another common cause is parents who had a poor experience of being parented, perhaps even suffering abuse and neglect themselves when children. Many people who experienced severely unhappy childhoods and had parents who didn't know how to care for them still go on to become good parents. But for some, the pattern becomes a cycle in which successive generations suffer emotionally damaging childhoods and an absence of the affection and affirmation that we need to grow into secure, confident adults.
A third, smaller category is where birth parents die or become too ill to care for their children. In these cases kinship care is often an option with another member of the family taking the child(ren) in if they have the space and financial resources to do so.
A very large number of children want to stay in touch with their parents - sometimes despite the most harrowing experiences. Part of the care journey is to make sure that safe and appropriate contact is possible.
Current government policy favours a more joined-up approach to addressing the needs of whole families, not just individual members. A family drug and alcohol court pilot scheme began in January 2008, to see if it could align the way that addicted parents and their dependent children were treated. There are also plans for 'multi-systemic therapy' - a package of support which tries to intervene across a whole family to get it functioning in a more constructive way. Many of these interventions are focused on keeping children out of care - once a child's in the care system, it becomes less likely that someone will try to work on improving the home situation.
Another alternative is 'support care' or respite care where children are given deliberately short 'holidays' in care to give parent and child the breathing space they need. Here, temporary care may be just what's needed to keep a family together.