fosterage

noun

1. (countable, uncountable)The act of fostering another's child as if it were one's own.

   “There still remains in the Islands, though it is passing fast away, the custom of fosterage. A Laird, a man of wealth and eminence, sends his child, either male or female, to a tacksman, or tenant, to be fostered.”

   “A youth passed in solitude, my best years spent under your gentle and feminine fosterage, has so refined the groundwork of my character, that I cannot overcome an intense distaste to the usual brutality exercised on board ship […]”

2. (countable, uncountable)The act of caring for another human being or animal.

   “1660, Robert May, The Accomplisht Cook, London: Obadiah Blagrave, 5th edition, 1685, I do acknowledg my self not to be a little beholding to the Italian and Spanish Treatises; though without my fosterage, and bringing up under the Generosities and Bounties of my Noble Patrons and Masters, I could never have arrived to this Experience.”

   “[…] the wisdom and prudence of penal-laws become the more necessary in the colonies to prevent the ill treatment of those friendless captives, brought solely for colonial interests into those states; and also for laws not only granting them immediate fosterage and protection, but holding out to them, after due and faithful services, profits and interests in those very states.”

   “In those animals in which the system of fosterage and protection has not been developed a great number of fertilized ova are produced, only a few of which come to maturity.”

3. (countable, uncountable)The condition of being the foster child.

   “He had not gone one step nearer the lives he had sought to approach nor bridged the restless shame and rancour that had divided him from mother and brother and sister. He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, fosterchild and fosterbrother.”

4. (countable, uncountable)The act of promoting or encouraging something.

   “1945, United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Reclamation, Insuring Proper Land Use, Columbia Basin Joint Investigations, Problem 3, Chapter 3, p. 13, Markets are not developed overnight and basic to the success of any marketing program is fosterage of a land use program that assures a permanent agriculture.”