Vivre un parcours de placement. Un champ des possibles pour l’enfant, les parents et la famille d’accueil

The experiences of both the child and the other people involved when social services foster a child have diversified. This article aims to learn about the management process produced by fostering and its consequences. This involves understanding why this process ends, for some children, in what Michel Giraud calls ‘une deterritorialisation de soi’ (loss of local identity) whilst, for others, it allows foster parenting relationships to be developed as Anne Cadoret’s work shows.More generally, this article asks us to question the normal stages of the process, the resulting orientations and the resulting implications for predicting the future. This range of possibilities can not be evaluated solely from the child’s perspective but must also be considered from the perspectives of the spaces and social groups that are recomposed by fostering. We intend to focus our demonstration on a child’s, the parents’ and the foster family’s ‘carrières morales’ (moral careers).