From North Carolina, a heads-up on an easy way to help kids in the state ...

As part of the Wendy's Wonderful Kids program, the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption is selling "Trick or Treat Gift Books" at Wake County Wendy's restaurants to raise money to fund a staff position in the Children's Home Society that would be "focused on finding permanent families for an identified group of children awaiting adoption in the Wake County area".

The Dave Thomas Foundation does great work toward placing foster kids in the USA and Canada and encourages adoption-friendly policies in businesses through their Adoption-Friendly Workplace campaign.

And in Arizona, the Tucson Juvenile Court is marking Kinship Family Adoption Day with nearly 60 kids officially being adopted by grandparents or other relatives, many after years in legal limbo.

And speaking of families stepping up, a new study is suggesting that children of divorced parents are less likely to be involved in caring for those parents when they are elderly.

"It’s not the divorce itself that affects the quality of the parent-child relationship, but it’s what happens afterwards such as geographical separation," study leader Adam Davey, of Temple University, said in a statement.

Conversely, this story from the UK claims that almost half of parents with grown children have had to bail their kids out of debt at some time or another, handing over an average of more than $5000 a whack to get their kids out of the red.

And, you know, I wouldn't be one bit surprised if many of these parents happen to be divorced.

A bit convoluted, but thought-provoking nonetheless, this article examines what it calls, "the new class of genetic orphans".

With advances in reproductive technologies, what will be considered ethical is in flux, and how the future will perceive what's right and what's wrong concerning how people who have come to be through science is only beginning to be seen.

There is now a growing number of folks calling themselves "donor conceived adults", and many of them are not happy.

They describe feelings of multiple losses as a result of being "genetic orphans". One person summed this up very powerfully by explaining, "genetic relationship’s fundamentally important because it’s not like a contract that can be set aside; it’s the only bond you can’t annul."

With debate raging over what makes a parent, how much biology counts, what should happen to unused frozen embryos, who has rights to know what about whom, and so on and so on, it looks to be a while, if ever, before agreement will be reached.

I'm not convinced that the author of this article makes a good case for her points of view, especially when she insists that proof that the "genetic relationship goes to our deepest roots of who we are and to whom we bond" is made clear when one looks at the masses of genealogical research done on the Internet. There are millions of hits a day on searches that involve boobs, but that doesn't mean we're all obsessed with them.