Among other areas of promoting children's well-being, foster care is now considered one of the most important ways of improving children's quality of life, which is associated with various challenges. Compared to other forms of institutional care and support for children and young people who do not have adequate parental care, foster care is characterized by significantly more positive effects on their well-being. As children can only receive the care they need and develop a secure attachment in a particular family, it is clear why there has been a recent focus on recruiting as many foster parents as possible and providing ongoing support for foster families. Regardless of the social policies implemented in our country, as in others, the attitudes of potential people are crucial to understanding the foster care system itself and their ability to support children and young people in this way. Therefore, this research focuses on analysing the attitudes of kindergarten teachers and parents of preschool children towards foster care. A non-random sample of N=273 parents of preschool children (92 fathers) and N=54 kindergarten teachers, all female, mean age M=38.38 (9.76) between 19 and 66 years, participated in the study. After consent was obtained, participants completed a questionnaire: 10 statements testing knowledge of foster care, 9 questions on socio-demographic data, 44 questions on attitudes towards foster care, and a question asking for a choice between the 8 reasons offered for those who are not foster parents. The data analysed showed that participants had moderate to high knowledge about foster care and that kindergarten teachers had better knowledge than parents. Regarding attitudes toward foster care, participants showed moderate agreement with the statements (M=3.38, SD=.34), meaning that their attitudes toward foster care are neither positive nor negative. Although parents and caregivers showed significant differences on 5 items of the survey, no significant difference was found between these two groups of participants in terms of the overall scale. When indicating the reasons why someone is not a foster parent, the most commonly cited reasons are not thinking about it at all, a lack of information, and a fear of becoming too emotionally attached to the child living in foster care, as well as some other reasons. Finally, the correlation analyses have shown that mothers have a more positive attitude towards foster care than fathers and the participants who have a smaller number of children. In a light of the findings identified, there is considerable scope for the implementation of a greater number of activities aimed at providing the public and kindergarten teachers with high quality information about the foster care system in order to promote it throughout our society.

Keywords: Education, kindergarten teachers, parents of preschool children, attitudes, foster care.