The Structure of Families who Adopt Children from Foster Care.

The 1997 Adoption and Safe Families Act (ASFA) gave incentives to states to expedite the adoption of children from foster care. Administrative data describe the changes in adoptive families from 1996 to 2003 in terms of the marital status and sex of the household head and in terms of the relationship of the parents to the child prior to adoption. Patterns in the way children with special needs were matched with different kinds of families are described. The data show that agencies have tapped the resources of families headed by single parents to provide permanency for older children and that older children adopted by fathers have spent more time as legal orphans than children adopted by single mothers.