The contribution interrogates sources and channels for the adaptation of Developmental psychology in discourses and institutions of child care in socialist Czechoslovakia, in particular the “Attachment Theory” coined by British psychoanalyst John Bowlby. During Stalinism, psychology and especially psychoanalysis were unwanted disciplines, rejected as bourgeois and pseudo-scientific. In communist Czechoslovakia there dominated pedagogical and medical approaches in state facilities of childcare, as I will demonstrate by the example of children’s homes. In the late 1950, then, researchers and scholars of psychiatry and psychology argued, that studies of children in Czechoslovak residential institutions delivered proof of children’s serious developmental retardations, and psycho-social and emotional problems. The experts introduced ideas that referred to Western concepts of psychology, especially to the idea of a natural and necessary bonding between children and their mothers that would be disturbed by long term residential care. Instead, they demanded the transformation of the system of children’s homes into a more “family-like” form and the strengthening of the family in order to prevent the admission of children into residential care. During the 1960s there was a controversial debate about this issue, especially between psychologists and pedagogues, who argued differently and introduced different concepts and ideas about the development, care, and education of children. This is a hitherto rather unknown aspect of the liberalization leading to the Prague Spring. The scholarly discussion affected the public and the government and resulted in several and profound reforms of the system of residential care.