Conventional wisdom is that children of same-sex parents do as well as, or even better than children from intact, two-parent married households. Many studies make that assertion.
It is massively wrong according to a new, very large, thorough study published this week by the journal Social Science Research. It was written by Mark Regnerus, a scholar at the University of Texas. The New Family Structures Study, or NFSS, is a breakthrough report.
Regnerus compares how young adult children, aged 18-39, of a parent who has had a same-sex relationship fare on 40 different social, emotional and relational outcomes when compared with traditional and other families.
The biggest differences were between children of women who have had a lesbian relationship – and those raised by still-married biological parents.
Fully 69 percent of those with lesbian mothers were on welfare as children – four times the 17 percent in intact families ever had that experience. In fact, 38 percent of the adult children of lesbian mothers are currently on welfare versus only 10 percent of those with married parents. That’s the same 4-1 ratio.
Only 8 percent of adult children from intact homes were unemployed when interviewed in 2011 versus 28 percent with a lesbian parent.
What’s most shocking is that only two people of those with married parents were ever touched sexually by a parent or an adult – while 23 percent of those with a lesbian mother had that experience! Golly, they are 11 times more apt to be molested!
The design of the NFSS research was brilliant.
Most research on the impact of homosexual parenting has relied on interviews with same-sex parents who are from convenience samples. For example, the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study conducted last year “recruited entirely from self-selection from announcements posted at lesbian events, in women’s bookstores and in lesbian newspapers in Boston, Washington and San Francisco.”
Such a sample is biased toward including better-educated, wealthier people who visit bookstores. What about the less educated or less likely to be employed? They aren’t interviewed. Of course, the children of these more affluent parents are more apt to do well.
By comparison, NFSS asked 3,000 young adults if either of their parents had a same-sex relationship while they were growing up. Result: 175 reported their mother was in a homosexual relationship, and 73 said the same about their father. That’s about 1.7 percent, a figure comparable to other studies. The sampling was so carefully done that it included both those with listed phone numbers and those who only use cell phones (about half the total).
Only 23 percent said they had spent at least three years in the same household with a romantic partner of their mother; an additional 57 percent did so for at least four months.
Among those with a father in a homosexual relationship, fewer than 2 percent said they had spent at least three years in that household. These relationships are much more volatile and short lived, but neither compares with the stability of married heterosexual parents.
Also, by interviewing young adults of homosexual parents, we can see how the experience shaped their adult lives. This is vastly more useful information than asking volunteer same-sex parents if their kids are doing well. Of course, they say yes.
More results: Three times as many young adults of lesbians were currently cohabiting as those with married parents (24 percent versus 9 percent). Even more young adults (31 percent) of divorced parents were living together. Twice as many from intact homes were employed full time as those with lesbian mothers.
Only 5 percent of those with married parents had considered suicide in the past year versus 12 percent of those with lesbian parents and 24 percent with homosexual fathers. That’s five times those from intact homes. Similarly, a young adult of married parents is less than half as likely to be in therapy “for a problem connected with anxiety, depression, or relationships” – as those with homosexual parents (8 percent versus 19 percent).
Only 12 percent of young adults with married parents had ever cheated while married or cohabiting, but a big 40 percent of adult children of lesbians had done so.
Just 8 percent of those from intact homes had ever been forced to have sex against their will versus 31 percent with lesbian parents and 25 percent of “gay” parents.
My 2 dads: Childhood not so 'happy and gay'
Another good article:
Despite the lack of empirical evidence for the claim that today there are large numbers of stable, two-parent gay households, for the last ten years, contemporary gay parenting research has nevertheless claimed that there are “no significant differences” (and some benefits) to being raised by same-sex parents. Therefore, Regnerus analyzed the new NFSS data to verify this claim. In the end, he found the claim to be more plausible when comparing the grown children of parents who had a same-sex relationship to the grown children of divorced, adopted, single-parented, or step-parented arrangements. The data suggest that the claim is false if one compares the grown children of a parent who had a same-sex relationship to those from IBFs [Intact Biological Familes]. While the study has been criticized for “comparing apples to oranges,” Regnerus’s work studies the reality of the population of children who were raised by parents who had same-sex relationships. As the next sections illustrate, there were clear and, in most cases, very unfortunate differences between the children of parents who had a same-sex relationship and those from biological families of still-married parents.
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However, as early as 2001, social scientists working on sexual orientation and parenting began to claim just that, that there were not as many differences as sociologists would expect between outcomes for children in same-sex versus heterosexual unions, and that the differences were not negative, but favorable.17 Since then, an increase in gay parenting research over the last decade has made similar claims, so that the emergent message from social scientists working in gay parenting has gone in a different direction, to allege that there are no differences in child outcomes—and some advantages—to being raised by parents with same-sex behavior.18
By challenging these claims, the Regnerus paper, as well as the Marks paper summarized earlier, is consistent with the consensus that existed at the turn of the millennium: to be raised by an intact biological family presents clear advantages for children over other forms of parenting. In particular, the NFSS provides evidence that previous generations of social scientists were unable to gather--evidence suggesting that children from intact, biological families also outperform peers who were raised in homes of a parent who had same-sex relationships. Therefore, these two new studies reaffirm—and strengthen—the conviction that the gold standard for raising children is still the intact, biological family.19
http://www.familystructurestudies.com/summary
This is not much different from the other data I've posted spanning the last three or four decades. This also makes sense now; to know that many of the studies for the last decade have been biased towards favoring homosexuality and not actual science.
