Business Week reports:
Same-sex couples are as good at raising well-adjusted, healthy children as heterosexual couples are, a review of 20 years of social science research finds.
“There’s a deeply held and widespread view out there that children need both a mother and a father to do well,” said study author Judith Stacey, a professor of sociology and of social and cultural analysis at New York University in New York City. “And it seems to be a bipartisan conviction — with a lot of public policy based on that premise — since literally both President Bush and President Obama have said exactly that.”
“But the point is that this orthodoxy is supposedly supported not just by a belief, but by actual research,” Stacey noted. “Yet we found that, in fact, there is no research that shows that children need both a mother and a father. And we looked everywhere.”
Stacey and study co-author Timothy J. Biblarz, chairman of the sociology department at the University of Southern California, published their findings in the February issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.
The review examined studies looking at a range of child outcomes and found that parenting quality trumps the gender of the parents.
In terms of parental skills, the reviewed studies typically measured familial dynamics such as parental consistency, nurturance, communication, structure, scheduling, stability, conflict and abuse. In terms of child well-being, the studies assessed psychosocial development measurements such as self-esteem, school achievement, peer relations, mental health status and depression, social problems and substance abuse.
The authors concluded that men and women of the same social class and educational background are more similar in the way they parent than women are with other women or men with all other men; that the offspring of lesbian and heterosexual parents are actually more alike than they are different; and that to date there is no research to suggest that parental gender has any significant impact on the well-being of a child.
“The bottom line is that it is the quality of parenting, not the gender of the parents, that matters for child outcomes,” said Stacey.
Comments 1
fosh0009 — January 30, 2010
The widely held belief that children do better when raised by one mother and one father suggests the power of societal culture. If there is no research to support this, then why do most people (including myself) think that this is the case? Seemingly, we never stopped to question the one father-one mother premise because we have been socialized to believe that only heterosexual couples can do a good job of raising a child.
As young children, we are bombarded with images and stories about "ideal" families. These families stereotypically include a father, a mother, two children, and perhaps a pet. Even as we get older, we rarely if ever see examples of families with same-sex parents. We are consistently taught that a child needs a mother and a father to do well, despite there being no research to support this.
Even if two parents are better than one, there is no reason why the gender of those parents should make a difference on the development of a child. We have simply been socialized to believe that it should. Fortunately, this new research could change the way we view parenting.