Residential child care is always a balance between a public mandate and a private living space. It not only provides socio-educational facilities as educational assistance, but also creates places where children and young people grow up and have a right to privacy. This qualitative study is therefore dedicated to the question of the extent to which socio-educational professionals enable local privacy for children and young people in residential child care under the given framework conditions. Based on ten interviews, the results show that, on one hand, the rooms of children and adolescents are seen as free and protected spaces and that care should be taken at the threshold of closed room doors and in the rooms. On the other hand, there are also restrictions on local privacy to protect children and adolescents, structural limitations when living in shared dorm rooms and institutional access to rooms declared as private. The study makes it clear that a privacy-sensitive approach in residential child care is highly relevant and should be considered in a differentiated manner.