information for practice

According to the most recent data available, 114,000 children in the United States foster care system were waiting to be adopted in 2005. These children have come into the foster care system due to abuse or neglect, and the public child welfare agencies have determined that adoption is their best option for achieving permanency. During that same year, however, only 51,000 children were adopted from foster care (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services 2006). Children waiting to be adopted are older (8.6 versus 6.7 years) than their adopted counterparts and have been in care for three and a half years, on average. . . . This report comes at a critical time. The Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA), passed in 1997, greatly increased efforts to move children from foster care to permanent homes in a timely manner. In response to ASFA, state legislatures have had to respond to comply with this bill. While adoption has always been a matter of state rather than federal law, we anticipated that state legislatures would be responding to ASFA as they often do to federal legislation, by introducing and passing related legislation. However, this analysis indicates that state legislatures are active in the area of foster care adoption and that much of this legislation is introduced not in direct response to federal legislation, but perhaps rather as part of efforts to address barriers to adoption in the states.