With seemingly ceaseless regularity nowadays, we are barraged by conflicting messages relating to adoption.

For now, the wonder of adoption is on display. Today is National Adoption Day, so media outlets nationwide are (or should be) writing stories about children whose lives are dramatically improved as a result of moving from foster care into permanent, loving families. In his proclamation marking November as National Adoption Month, President Bush effused that our country is "blessed" by this extraordinary institution.

Just weeks ago, a very different picture was being transmitted. The focus then was on Raymond and Vanessa Jackson, who allegedly starved the four sons they adopted from foster care in New Jersey. Press accounts cast an appropriately suspicious shadow on the couple and the state's child welfare system, but they also raised broader concerns about the competence and motives of adoptive parents per se; in particular, they suggested people are adopting children from foster care in order to get state and federal subsidies.

So which is it? Lucky kids or exploited kids? Good people trying to do the right thing, or suspect people with dubious motives? What are we to think when we receive such disparate impressions, not just today, but time after time when there's a high-profile case involving adoption?

Based on available research and extensive experience, two unambiguous images emerge: that most adoptive parents are doing exactly the same things as most biological parents, providing their children with all the affection and care they humanly can; and that, with rare exceptions, boys and girls are far better off in permanent families than in foster care, orphanages and other forms of temporary or institutional care.

But adoption's history of secrecy has afforded us with too few opportunities to learn about its realities. So we tend to assume we're learning far more from singular, usually aberrational experiences -- man bites dog is a story, after all, while dog bites man is not -- than we really are.

Yes, financial inducements intended to increase the number of adoptions can cause complications. But there is no indication that horrors such as the one in New Jersey are being repeated with any regularity elsewhere, even though nearly every state has received federal incentives and thousands of parents throughout the country have received state subsidies.

Moreover, even in the worst state systems, good things are happening daily. Many children are being reunited with newly healthy mothers, fathers and other biological relatives, while a fast-growing number of kids are being adopted by loving parents who treat them well.

"There are real issues we need to address, and we're working to do just that," says William H. Gray III, a former U.S. House member from Pennsylvania who is now vice chairman of the Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care, which is conducting a major nationwide study on how to improve federal financing and court supervision of foster care and adoption. "But stereotyping the whole process and the people it serves, especially the children, isn't going to make anyone's life better."

Exactly. In fact, if Americans come to think that the aberrational stories are representative of the norm, it threatens to make lots of people's lives worse.

I am not defending any system that does less than everything possible to protect the children within it. But we live in a society in which nearly every program that helps vulnerable children receives insufficient resources; in which well-intentioned quick fixes like federal incentives replace (rather than augment) thoughtful, long-term solutions such as post-adoption services; and in which cases like the one in New Jersey fuel our worst stereotypes about adoptive parents, their children, and adoption itself.

On National Adoption Day, states across the country will celebrate by holding public ceremonies at which hundreds of boys and girls will get the opportunity -- or, to use the president's word, the blessing -- of moving into permanent, loving families.

I'd like to suggest it's also a good time for all of us to start learning more about adoption and foster care, because the problems will be fixed more rapidly if faulty stereotypes are replaced by genuine understandings. And the ultimate beneficiaries will be the 120,000-plus American children who will still need homes long after we turn another page on our calendars.