Children of Lesbians May Do Better Than Their Peers

The professional Christian set and Bible beaters time and time again disseminate self-serving and often totally unfounded arguments that two gay parents cannot provide as good of home for children as their heterosexual counterparts. Now, Time magazine has an article on a new study that documents that lesbian parents may out perform straight couple parents. Yep, that's right. Grab a raincoat so that you don't get drench with all the spittle flying from Christianist organizations like Family Research Council and Concern Women [Bitches] for America. Of course these organizations which continue to cite works of Paul Cameron who was discredited 25 years ago are whining that the study is flawed because gay related organizations helped fund it. Talk about a double standard! Here are some highlights from the Time article:
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The teen years are never the easiest for any family to navigate. But could they be even more challenging for children and parents in households headed by gay parents? That is the question researchers explored in the first study ever to track children raised by lesbian parents, from birth to adolescence.
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For their new study, published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco (and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles), and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at the University of Amsterdam, focused on what they call planned lesbian families — households in which the mothers identified themselves as lesbian at the time of artificial insemination.
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The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.
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Not surprisingly, the researchers found that 41% of children reported having endured some teasing, ostracism or discrimination related to their being raised by same-sex parents. But Gartrell and Bos could find no differences on psychological adjustment tests between the children and those in a group of matched controls. At age 10, children reporting discrimination did exhibit more signs of psychological stress than their peers, but by age 17, the feelings had dissipated.
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Because their children are more likely to experience discrimination and stigmatization as a result of their family circumstances, these mothers can be more likely to broach complicated topics, such as sexuality and diversity and tolerance, with their children early on. Having such a foundation may help to give these children more confidence and maturity in dealing with social differences and prejudices as they get older.
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Gartrell hopes to test some of these theories with additional studies. She is also hoping to collect more data on gay-father households; gay fatherhood is less common than lesbian motherhood because of the high costs of surrogacy or adoption that gay couples face in order to start a family.