Aim. The need to provide care to minors who have been partially or permanently deprived of care by their parents or legal guardians is one of the key and constantly deepening challenges of the state’s social policy. The key care and educational competences of foster parents, as well as the well-being of a child placed in foster care in the context of diagnosing and meeting their needs, are in turn a contemporary challenge of care pedagogy. Foster care in Poland requires constant attention and strengthening of many areas of its functioning, while this system is faced with the need to strengthen family care and the desire to gradually move away from institutional care. The subject of this article will be an analysis of the process of deinstitutionalization of foster care in Poland, with an attempt to answer questions about its justification and effects, both systemic and in the context of the effectiveness (or weakening) of protecting minors against domestic violence, and the possible implementation of the changes planned within it. Methods and materials. This study uses multi-source materials – based on thematic literature, including a review of research around deinstitutionalization, as well as an analysis of legal acts regulating the foster care system in Poland. Results and conclusion. The need for a gradual transition from institutional forms of foster care to strengthening and developing family care, which has been signaled for many years, has been moving to subsequent stages in recent years. Although it is difficult to discuss the idea of strengthening family care itself, doubts are seen at the level of possible effects of a disrupted deinstitutionalization process. In Polish conditions, foster care has been in this process for over two decades – however, the deinstitutionalization indicator still does not allow us to state that we have come significantly closer to achieving the set assumptions. The unequivocal results of analyses in terms of the causes of the failures in question indicate the need to strengthen the biological environment (working with the family, diagnosing and minimizing barriers in the care and education sphere, increasing the resources of the local environment in the field of family policy), as well as striving to increase the number of candidates for foster parenting.