This paper is concerned with a subset of children in foster care who present as unable to use resources available to them. They make individuals involved with them feel inadequate and useless. Perhaps as a result of this, even from toddler-hood, these children experience serial disruption of foster placements. It is suggested that using Green's (1986) concept of the “dead mother syndrome” (whereby a child experiences a mother as physically present but emotionally dead) provides a useful framework to support both individual psychodynamic psychotherapy with the child and also a range of work with the team around the child.