The legal status of and social attitudes toward same-sex couples will likely remain uneven and in a state of evolution for the foreseeable future. But if we open up the door for cool heads and objective measurement of reality to prevail, we’ll continue making the progress already well underway. Social science research, such as the recent findings published in the journal Pediatrics and reported by Time magazine, will be fundamental to our understanding of same-sex couples, especially as it relates to parenting.
As Time indicates, it has for years been part of the collective social science wisdom that children raised in households led by same-sex parents demonstrate no appreciable difference in any measure of health, intelligence, or emotional well-being compared to kids raised in a traditional family household setting. But a new study which peered into nearly a quarter century’s worth of data collected by the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) suggests that teenage children with two moms not only fare quite well as they approach adulthood but may in fact come out ahead of their peers in measures of behavior, emotional health and academic performance.
Alice Park writes in Time that the research team led by University of California at San Francisco psychiatry professor Nanette Gartrell and University of Amsterdam behavioral scientist Henry Bos aimed to explore one core question: whether same-sex parents and their teenage children face pronounced and unique challenges over and beyond the expected difficulties that come with adolescence. A data set stretching back to 1986 and which involved information collected from 84 families and 154 women served as basis for the inquiry.
The research found that the children of lesbian women, whether single or paired, came out on par with their peers in behavioral and social indices, a finding that is in keeping with the findings gleaned from previously conducted research. But Gartrell and Bos draw some surprising additional conclusions. Teens raised in two-mom households were found to come out ahead of the pack in self-reported measures of self-confidence and in academic achievement, and were found less prone to exhibit behavioral problems.
The research reveals that more than 40 percent of kids from the same-sex couple families report having experienced abusive treatment from their peers as a result of the structure of their families, indicating as might be expected that there remain challenges and difficulties unique to such families that kids from traditional families do not experience. But while the researchers expected to find parity and equivalence across the board, the suggestion of a developmental advantage among kids of two-mom households came to the research team as a surprise.
As she is quoted by Time, Gartrell reflects upon the unanticipated conclusions that were drawn from the analysis:
“We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls. I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn’t something I anticipated.”
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