ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on key findings and hammers out implications for practice. Few are naive enough to believe that adoption outcomes hinge on single characteristics or practices, no matter how significant they may seem. Adoption workers, parents, researchers, administrators, and policymakers all know and respect the complexity of adoption. While permanency planning legislation has freed many children for adoption, agencies in California have been slow to implement the specifics of legislation. Conventional home studies and selections of adoptive families double as preplacement preparation. The importance of providing lasting and intensive supportive services rather than focusing on preplacement services is heightened by the explosion of foster-parent adoptions. Professionals in adoption are beginning to stress the need for postlegal as well as postplacement services for adopted children and their families. Adoption workers and the therapists to whom social workers refer adoptive families need to have a far better understanding and greater commitment to working with educational systems—particularly special education.
