According to the Spring 2009 Thrivant Financial magazine,

According to the Child Welfare League of America, 234,348 children were adopted in the U.S. between 1989 and 2005. Of that number, 22,710 were international placements

I was somewhat surprised by this fact, although I should not have been.

My surprise was due to the responses I usually see in online discussions of international adoptions. In these discussions, one side will be critical of people trying to adopt internationally because there are children in the U.S. who need a good home and there is no one to adopt them. The other side defends those who adopt internationally by saying that the bureaucratic overhead is less. Both sides seem to accept as fact that international adoptions are a large part of adoptions by U.S. citizens.

For me, the adoption statistics put this discussion in a different light. If 90% of adoptions by U.S. citizens were international, I would worry that the adoption process in our country was deeply and severely broken. Instead, 10% of adoptions by U.S. citizens are international. While some of this may be due to problems in our adoption system, international adoptions are a small enough percentage of the whole that I can accept that international adoption is just the choice some people make.

ETA: Apparently the article I was referencing is online.

A reminder that many games of our youth were not that stimulating. The author does miss one distinct possible advantage of real life games. They usually involve face-to-face time with real life people, and they often involve disagreements which, without a computer to give the "right" answer, require the development of social interaction skills. However, the main point that video games are a lot more mentally stimulating than, for example, "Candy Land" is a good one to have pointed out in this age of "video games are destroying the children!" paranoia.

Now, you can never completely trust media coverage, but according to an MSNBC article on a study about the behavioral affects of day care the study defined child care as "care by anyone other than the child’s mother who was regularly scheduled for at least 10 hours per week". The key word in there being "mother". Excuse me? Even if it would only make a small difference in the number of children counted as in child care, that definition should read "parents" or "mother or father" or even, if we really want to be general "legal guardians".