At Case Western Reserve University, doctoral student Lindsey Houlihan has focused her research on interracial adoption. She says that despite the culture clashes, they usually work...

Houlihan: The research does indicate that most trans-racial adoptions fare very well in terms of overall child adjustment. Yes, there are issues, and yes, they need to be addressed. But overall, the majority of trans-racial adoptions are successful. And most of those studies have been done in the United States in African-American and Caucasian families.

About 60% of the children available for adoption in the U.S. are black. But now stories of Romanian orphanages and Chinese girls being abandoned have renewed interest in foreign adoptions. The head of Adoption Network Cleveland, Betsy Norris, says parents can still have cultural differences in any overseas adoption...

Norris: Families need to prepare for some of those issues. If the child is a different race or is going to look very different from the adoptive family, that is going to bring on some of those issues sooner because the differences are going to be more obvious. But even for a child who is of the same race and can blend in, there are going to be cultural issues. There is going to be the typical adoptee issues of wondering why this happened the way it did. For children who were adopted into another country, the loss issues can be even greater because they lost not only their family, but their whole culture and could wonder "Nobody in my country could parent me and keep me? I had to come all the way here for a family to want me?"

Where once assimilation was the goal of every intercultural adoption, the trend today is to acknowledge and even embrace the diversity. Lindsey Houlihan...

Houlihan: It is not, you are Caucasian parents who adopt a Chinese child or African-American child, you are a multicultural family and to acknowledge that on some level. But just to deny that and say, "You're just like us and love is color-blind" is where I think that families are naive.