Question

Why has it been so difficult to study the consequences for children of growing up in same-sex families? What do the studies, limited though they may be, find?

Answer 1

According to the American Psychological Association(2005), there is no study which may show that children of same sex parents are at any kind of disadvantage compared to children from heterosexual families. However, a number of researchers have pointed out significant methodological problems with the research on same sex parenting. This has rendered difficulty in studying any causal effect between same sex parenting and advantageous or negative child development. Most of the studies have been done using non-probability samples which means that every member of the broader group of sample has not had an equal chance of being selected into the sample through random sampling. Instead, the chosen samples of children from lesbian/gay parents may give us interesting leads and suggests key insights about the dynamics of child rearing in such non traditional families, but they don’t yield much reliable data which could be inferred from them outside the specific individuals who are studied. Thus, in terms of homosexual families, most of the sample has constituted of lesbian parents and there is an under-representation of the children of homosexual male parents.

Regardless of the difficulty in carrying out the studies, as homosexual relationships have become widely common in public consciousness and in the subsequent building of families, interest over the differences between homesexual and heterosexual parenting have become of great interest. Studies have approached areas such as gender identity, behaviorial development and the negative impact of social stigma on children of parents with a homosexual orientation. The studies show a trend towards ‘no significant difference’ in the development of children due to parental sexual orientation. Positive development which has been recorded is by-and-large a result of warmth and positive parenting and not the family structure per say and the negative impact is due to the permeability of discriminatory attitudes regarding non traditional family structure to which the children may be exposed in their social interaction with others. Thus, statistical research points in favour of the role of the quality of parenting rather than the sexual orientation of the parents in determining the consequences for child development.