The New Federal Adoption Law
It is often said that American child welfare policy operates like a pendulum. It swings from expressing the predominant objective of keeping troubled families together to making protection of children from parental harm its top priority. Family preservation and child safety are treated as two opposing ends of the spectrum of child welfare concerns. These shifts have not been based on any real changes in rates of child maltreatment. They are often responses to highly publicized incidents of abuse by parents or by the system and to the political currents surrounding child welfare debates. "Watching federal policy develop in the field of child abuse and neglect over the past two decades has been like watching the sunrise in Barrow, Alaska in late November!" proclaimed one expert. "Federal and state political action over the last several decades could be characterized as being symbolic rather than substantive, reactive and punitive rather than proactive and supportive (of either children or adults)."2
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