ABSTRACT
Child welfare workers have long understood the importance of judicious preplacement assessments of child and family and the fit between them. For new and fost-adopt placements, a collaborative assessment process in which the agency provides information to the family about several possible children, expresses interest in learning more about some children, and finally meets a child or sibling group has become the standard. Agencies should maintain systematic records that indicate what information was provided and should use these records to assess their own performance. When parents had the opportunity to volunteer ideas about how the agency could improve, information and preparation were most often identified. Social workers commented on the preparation of the children placed for adoption. Families that adopted children who were considerably different than the kind of children they had planned on when they began the adoption process has more difficult placements.
