If Adoption and Safe Families Act Can’t Be Repealed, Here’s How to At Least Make it Better

Former Stoneleigh Fellow Kathleen Creamer and Chris Gottlieb take a close look at the Adoption and Safe Families Act for The Imprint News and offer recommendations that improve children’s chances of achieving true permanency and eliminate some of the biases that permeate child welfare systems.

A new memorandum from the federal government’s top child welfare leaders argues that the field has been getting one of its most important goals — permanency — all wrong. After examining the latest research — including new analyses of federal data conducted by the U.S. Children’s Bureau itself — the memorandum concludes that an obsession with permanency-on-paper and a rush to meet arbitrary timelines is denying children the permanency that really matters — “relational permanency.”

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