With a focus on optimizing the potential of older child adoption as a key element in child welfare services, this book analyzes the personal and social economy values of adoption, and the changing characteristics of adoptive children and families, while providing models of psychosocial adjustment to adoption.  The implications for child welfare policy and services are explored in depth, with special attention to methods for identifying risk factors and to strategies for maintaining adoptions that have been identified as at-risk for disruption.