Oh The Horror: Children Fare Better In Traditional Families.

Study: Children fare better in traditional mom-dad families
By Cheryl Wetzstein

Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married, mother-father parents.

“The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go,” Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in his study in Social Science Research.

Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are “no differences” between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Mr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.

Mr. Regnerus‘ study of 2,988 persons ages 18 to 39 — including 175 adults raised by lesbian mothers and 73 adults raised by gay fathers — marks the first research from the new dataset, which initially included some 15,000 persons.

The second study, also in Social Science Research, takes a critical look at the basis of an oft-cited American Psychological Association (APA) report on gay parenting.

The APA brief says, “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents,” said Loren Marks, associate professor at the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University.

However, after looking at the 59 studies that undergird this assertion, “the jury is still out,” Mr. Marks said. “The lack of high-quality data leaves the most significant questions [about gay parenting] unaddressed and unanswered.”

Problems with the APA-cited studies were their tiny size; dependence on wealthy, white, well-educated lesbian mothers; and a failure to examine common outcomes for children, such as their education, employment and risks for poverty, criminality, early childbearing, substance abuse and suicide. Instead, the APA studies often looked at children’s gender-role behaviors, emotional functioning and sexual identity.

An APA spokesman could not be immediately reached for comment. However, Mr. Marks‘ findings have been presented previously in gay-marriage lawsuits on behalf of those arguing in favor of traditional marriage, and critics noted that Mr. Marks‘ paper had not been published yet and that he was not an expert on gay families.

Jennifer Chrisler, executive director of the Family Equality Council, declined to comment on the studies, which she had not seen.

But she was confident they could not counteract “the very deep and rich body of research that has been conducted over the last 30 years” that show that children raised by gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender mothers and fathers “do equally as well as their counterparts raised by heterosexual couples.”

“And I can tell you anecdotally that, given the thousands and thousands of families that I spend time with on a regular basis,” that what happens in their lives “bears out and confirms everything that we see in the research, in terms of the positive outcomes for these kids,” said Ms. Chrisler, who is raising twin sons with her wife, Cheryl Jacques.