While foster care sets up foster parenthood, it also denies it, insofar as our socio-legal system functions on the exclusivity of bifiliation and the new paradigm established in the 1980s in child protection privileges maintaining links with the parents of origin. However, the extreme diversity of situations of children in care requires recognition of the importance of the child’s emotional ties with his or her foster family and what may result therefrom in some cases in terms of filiation. The approach in terms of attachment, affiliation and parenthood highlights the diversity and complexity of situations and calls for a reconfiguration of the normative system hitherto applicable so that recent and future developments can be more readily implemented in a rapidly changing society.