OutRight

Gay Moms, Healthy Kids
Using hard cold research to counter the scare tactics used by the homophobic right
by Dale Carpenter

Children are at the center of the culture war over the place of gays in American life. A new review of two decades’ worth of studies on children raised by same-sex couples gives some ammunition to both sides, especially to gay parents, but the battle is far from over.

Anxiety about potential child molestation and about what effect gays might have on children’s sexuality and general development drives several present-day controversies. It is surely behind the Boy Scouts’ policy barring openly gay scoutmasters. It is behind the effort of some public schools to bar gay-straight student clubs and the resistance to a "diversity" curriculum promoting tolerance of gays. It is also part of the justification for prohibiting same-sex marriage: Marriage is for raising children, the argument goes, and we know gays just can’t do that.

Three states–Arizona, Florida, and Utah–explicitly forbid adoptions by homosexuals. A larger number of states presume against child custody and adoption by gays. A possible basis for these laws is that gays are not fit parents or aren’t as likely as straights to be fit parents; it’s generally just not in the best interests of children to be raised by gays. But is this best-interests justification a mere pretext for antigay animus?

Two sociologists at the University of Southern California, Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, recently analyzed the available research on children raised by gay couples. In general, they found that children raised by gay couples are somewhat different from those raised in traditional, opposite-sex households. But overall, they turn out just fine.

There is good news for gay parents raising kids. According to Biblarz, "Children brought up by lesbians and gay men are well adjusted, have good levels of self-esteem, [and] are as likely to have high educational attainments as children raised in traditional heterosexual families." There is apparently no difference in the children’s mental health, including the incidence of anxiety and depression.

In fact, children raised by gay women have advantages over children raised in opposite-sex homes. Co-mothers, the researchers found, are typically more involved in their children’s lives and are more nurturing than heterosexual parents. Two gay mothers also tend to be more in agreement on approaches to parenting.

However, children raised by same-sex parents are not exactly like their peers in traditional families. Some of those differences are arguably for the better. Teenage boys with gay parents were more sexually restrained, less aggressive, and more nurturing. Girls raised by gay women aspire to occupations not considered traditionally female. They also act and dress in less stereotypically feminine ways.

One study reviewed by Biblarz and Stacey found that young adults raised by gay women were more likely to engage in same-sex activity (but no more likely to identify as gay). This will be fodder for religious conservatives opposed to gay parenting.

However, there are two problems with the conclusion that children raised in gay households are more likely to have same-sex experiences. The first is that the study relied on self-reporting. It seems likely that children raised by gay parents feel less shame about same-sex sexual activity and are therefore more likely to report it when it occurs. That does not tell us much about whether they are actually experimenting more with gay sex than children raised in heterosexual families. The other problem is that the sample size was extremely small, involving only 25 interviewees for the gay households and 20 for the straight households.

So despite headlines claiming that researchers had found "differences" in gay-raised children and that they were challenging politically correct social science favorable to gay parents, the news is generally good.

But we can’t be too sanguine about what is still really debatable and inconclusive evidence on gay parenting. The studies reviewed by Biblarz and Stacey have been characterized by small sample sizes, nonrandom canvassing of subjects, and short time series. Nearly all have involved gay female, rather than gay male, parents. Some have argued that the studies are tainted by possible researcher bias, although there is no hard evidence for this. At the very least, all studies agree that there is certainly some stress visited on the children of gay households because of teasing by other children.

The truth is, we still can’t be certain what effect gay parents have on the development of their children. We have a pretty good idea, but not yet enough to convince the skeptics.