This paper will attempt to investigate the close relationship between the practices of the Foundling Hospital, established in 1741, and the Hanway's Acts, (The Poor Law) enacted in 1762 and 1767. During the transition from the Foundling Hospital practices to The Hanway's Acts, the parent came to be regarded as a suitable child educator. The objective of this paper is to examine and clarify the interaction between family and education as it occurred in the 18th century. The petition to secure a Royal Charter for the establishment of the Foundling Hospital, the rules and regulations as to the management of children within the hospital and the pamphlets written by Jonas Hanway, (a governor of the Foundling Hospital), all indicate the following thing. Treatment of children under the Hanway's Acts was the same as the maintenance and education attempted in the Foundling Hospital. The Hanway's Acts sought to: 1. Maintain records of education. 2. Establish and record the whereabouts of the poor infants in the parish. 3. Implement a program to send these poor infants to rural areas. 4. Patrol guardians with inspectors. 5. Subsidize education. The Act seemed to make each parish as a whole like a Foundling Hospital. This considered, it could be concluded that the Hanway Act originated from the Foundling Hospital ethos. On the other hand, the experimental defects, which occurred in the Foundling Hospital highlighted the original point of the Hanway's Acts, (emphasis on a family bond). The defect being that Foundling Hospital ethos would destroy the family bond on which the order of society depended. In the Foundling Hospital, children were not only maintained, but also educated to be industrious laborers. But as the Foundling Hospital increased in scale, the faults became more and more obvious. It was suggested that the Foundling Hospital ethos made children disobedient and unsuitable for laboring. The physicians involved in the Foundling Hospital maintained that child-care by wet nurse secured a lower survival rate among children than those fed by mother's milk. In short, the Foundling Hospital came to be regarded as an unsuitable educational establishment for children. In place of this, the parent-child ties were recognized as paramount in the education of children. The pivotal aspect that the Hanway's Acts intended to promote relied heavily on the idea of the amalgamation of family and education. The failure of one emphasized the importance of the other. In summary, the Hanway's Acts was very much based upon the experiments and the trial and error of the Foundling Hospital.