Fostering is a form of care for children who are separated from their families for different reasons. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate findings from national and international literature related to different ways of matching children and prospective foster parents. Social workers have an important role in the preparation process because their task consists of preparing a child for a placement in a way which minimizes the occurance of trauma. It is very important to prepare the child as well as the potencial foster family because the arrival of a new family member significantly changes the dinamic of the family. After the child is separated from its family, a social worker starts searching for a foster family that best suits the childs' needs. The process of balancing the characteristics of foster parents and the child with the purpose of finding the best possible placement experts call matching. Matching is a complex process which contains of making a number of decisions and it is influenced by a variety of factors depicted in this paper. In addition to a variety of factors and concerning the practice policies this paper describes three types of matching. Moreover, the paper illustrates the manner in which matching is conducted in Western Australia accompanied by different types of questionnaries the social workers use during the process.