This book describes how changes in the federal Title IV-E adoption assistance program provide an opportunity for adoptive families who are struggling to meet the medical and psychological needs of their children to receive badly needed financial and medical assistance. The guide is designed to help adoptive families apply for adoption assistance after legalization and for retroactive adoption assistance payments, regardless of their state of residence.

Parents, child advocates, and family attorneys need to understand how to put the federal adoption assistance law to work for their children and clients in order to create adoptions, keep them intact and healthy, and encourage future special needs adoptive placements as well. This guide through the state adoption bureaucracies shows how to navigate the adoption assistance process, negotiate an adoption assistance contract, and plan effective administrative hearings and adoption subsidy appeals. Essentially four books in one, this book includes and explains the federal IV-E adoption assistance law and many of the important clarifications that have been issued by the federal government over the last two decades; takes the reader inside the culture of the state adoption bureaucracies to show how they operate, and why they sometimes seem to be working against adoptive families instead of with them; illustrates how to negotiate and periodically renegotiate the crucial adoption assistance contract, and how to file and prepare for an administrative hearing and an appeal should the decision go against a family; and provides easy-to-understand examples in numerous sidebars that illustrate important points every adoptive family should understand. Families who have or will adopt children with special needs may be able to save tens of thousands of dollars using the information provided here.

This book goes beyond traditional families and traditional notions about their impact on child development to consider parallel issues with less-frequently-studied types of families. For developmentalists, family specialists, clinicians, and educators.

The world is full of hurt children, and bringing one into your home can quickly derail the easy family life you once knew. Get effective suggestions, wisdom, and advice to parent the hurt child in your life. The best hope for tragedy prevention is knowledge! Updated and revised.

Without avoiding the grim statistics, this book reveals the real hope that hurting children can be healed through adoptive and foster parents, social workers, and others who care. Includes information on foreign adoptions.

Explores current issues surrounding adoption in the United States, milestones in adoption history, and individuals who have profoundly affected child welfare and adoption philosophies and practices.

Discusses 1.) if federal adoption subsidies were available for all older children or only those from minority groups and 2.) what criteria the Dept. of Children and Families uses to award a subsidy.