ABSTRACT
The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act of 1980 mandated that child welfare agencies implement preplacement preventive services, programs to reunify placed children with their biological families, subsidized adoption, and periodic case reviews of children in care. Formal disruptions involve returning the child to the adoption agency and are typically all that is recorded in adoption statistics. To argue that successful services to promotes older child adoption are the hub of effective child welfare services may be excessive. Statutes varied on several accounts but all reflected concern that adoption promote the welfare of the child. Transracial or transcultural adoptions involve the adoption of a child by parents of a race different than the child, and are mostly found among older child adoptions. Adoption agencies have a general set of guidelines for selecting parents for adoptive children. The history of adoption and foster care research is rich with unsuccessful attempts to identify critical components of a good match.
