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.