Only a generation ago, adoption wasn't very common. The ones that did take place were closed (secretive) and rarely occurred across racial lines. Few people understood the psychological implications of adoption, but then governments began to address child welfare issues and the social sciences became well-known professions, with thousands choosing to focus on adoption issues, especially attachment and bonding.

Two groundbreaking books helped change public perception about adoption. In 1954, Helen Doss detailed her adoption of nearly a dozen minority and mixed-race children in her book, The Family Nobody Wanted. She described how she learned that race made no difference in the personalities and growth of her children. She also discussed her efforts to armor them against the ingrained racism of the time. Jean Paton's book, The Adopted Break Silence, described forty adults, adopted as children, who shared their stories about the need to have connections to “all the pieces” of their lives. Thirty of the forty participants described their adoptions as “wonderful” or “generally positive,” but even those who were most satisfied felt that adults should have access to their original birth information.

In the early '70s, therapists and mental health workers began to promote the importance of a psychological parent (a person the child emotionally identifies as a parent in her life) rather than a biological parent, and advocated the necessity of speed in placing children into permanent families.

More legislation was passed to address problems with the struggle between parental rights and child advocacy in foster care and state agency adoption placements. The 1980 Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act encouraged states to act on the findings of psychologists and therapists for quick, lasting placements. The Adoption and Safe Families Act, passed in 1997, stressed “permanency planning” and “represented a policy shift away from family reunification and toward adoption.”

All of these movements and laws together have resulted in adoption becoming a process that is not only well accepted by society, but one that is easier than ever. Children no longer have to wait years in foster homes for birth parents who they will never be reunited with, and international adoption is now common.

Unlike a few years ago, adoptive parents today are no longer restricted by race, nationality, marital status, or sexual orientation from becoming a parent. There's a huge national effort to bring adoptable children to the attention of prospective parents, regardless of their race. However, even though Congress now forbids race from being used as the sole criterion for adoption placement decisions (1994), same-race placement is still considered an important guideline by many agencies and social service departments.

The Multiethnic Placement Act prohibited agencies receiving federal funds from denying transracial adoptions on the sole basis of race, but permitted the use of race as one factor. In 1996, the Inter-Ethnic Adoption Amendment made it impermissible to employ race at all.

Additionally, private agencies such as Casey Family Services, the North American Council on Adoptable Children, Great Kids, Inc., We Care Child & Family Services, and Adoption Ark coordinate with government agencies to help meet the needs of tens of thousands of children who wait in foster care.