Post-Legal Adoption Services For Children with Special Needs and Their Families : Challenges and Lessons Learned

With the goal of expanding and enhancing services to adoptive families of children with special needs, post-legal adoption services have been established in annual adoption discretionary grant announcements. Under that priority area in 1998, 15 3-year grants were awarded to increase permanency and well-being for children with special needs by preventing adoption disruption, dissolution, or out-of-home placement. This briefing paper synthesizes the final reports of those 15 projects. The projects targeted post-legal adoptive families and their children with special needs, pre-adoptive families, single adoptive parents, transracial adoptive families, kinship families.