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This chapter provides an overview of assessment and intervention issues in clinical practice with lesbian and gay adoptive parent families. It begins by describing the context of lesbian and gay adoption and then addresses the various phases of lesbian and gay adoptive parent family formation (from assessment to postplacement)—with an emphasis on the contexts influencing family development at these stages—as well as relevant assessment and intervention issues. Recommendations for adoption workers and therapists who work with lesbian and gay adoptive families at these phases will be made throughout. Case examples are provided to illustrate key issues and conflicts faced by these families, as well as opportunities and challenges for therapists.

This chapter discusses how two important state documents of the 1960s—Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action,” and the U.S. Supreme Court decision of Loving v. Virginia—together mark the historical basis for the multiracial movement’s preoccupation with the family. These two significant documents reveal a seemingly contradictory national stance on the American family. Both were state initiatives to reinforce heterosexual marriage, and by extension the heteronormative family, as private units that fortify national well-being. The combined legacy of these state documents figured so largely within discourses on the multiracial family that one could trace it through the key components of movement: the legitimization of multiracial families, the primacy of (white) maternal love for multiracial children, and suburbanization as the racially normalized condition of family development.

The Harlem Children’s Zone® (HCZ) and the Brazelton Touchpoints Center engaged in ‘collaborative consultation’ to co-create early childhood and parent support programming. This collaboration is the story of a community coming together to reclaim and reconstruct environments for raising children and to connect adult caregivers to support each other in that process. A relational, developmental, strengths-based, and culturally grounded approach was employed to build mutual respect, trust, and understanding over time in authentic relationships required for shared learning, and for programme development and improvement. The inherent and culturally rooted strengths and resources of parents, and other family and community members mutually reinforced each other as contexts and conditions were created in which these caregivers could come together to activate their community’s collective problem-solving capacity, to share their dreams for their children, and to provide emotional support and concrete resources for each other.

Recent research on the development of social investment has demonstrated reform progress not only in different regions of Europe, but also in Latin America and South-East Asia. However, the specific substance of the social investment agendas varies strongly between these regions. Why have social investment ideas and policies been more developed in some regions and countries than in others? Building on the theoretical framework of this volume, our chapter suggests that the content of regional social investment agendas depends on policy legacies in terms of investment vs consumption-oriented policies and their interaction with structural pressures. In a second step, we argue that the chances of social investment agendas to be implemented depend on the availability of political support coalitions between organizational representatives of the educated middle classes and either business or working-class actors. We illustrate our claims with reference to family policy developments in France, Germany, and Switzerland.