A new study purports to show that the children of same-sex parents have far greater emotional problems than those with different-sex parents—but the study comes from a professor who is a fellow of the Marriage and Religion Research Institute, a project of the Family Research Council, which has been designated an anti-LGBT hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
The study’s author, Donald Paul Sullins, is a sociology professor at the Catholic University of America and a Catholic priest. He has defended the work of Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin whose studies on same-sex parents have been widely discredited. Sullins used 16 years of data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), which included information about 512 same-sex parents, to find that “Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent … for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.” The study was published in the British Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science.
Zack Ford of Think Progress has scrutinized Sullins’ study and pointed out how it is “hugely flawed.” Most prominently, like Regnerus’s study, it ignores whether the children who had a biological connection to one parent were from prior relationships, “which would suggest their negative outcomes are related to a broken home instead of having two parents of the same sex.”
Stack this against the many, many studies (helpfully and recently collected) showing that children of same-sex parents fare no worse than those of different-sex parents (and may even have particular strengths in some areas), and I think the message remains clear. [Update: Nathaniel Frank, who helped collect those studies, has weighed in himself on Sullins’ work, confirming Ford’s points.]
At the same time, I hope that the positive studies of LGBTQ parents don’t make us feel like we need to be perfect parents, or that our children should be perfect. Regardless of any academic studies, I hope we LGBTQ parents know our own worth as well as our limitations. Our children are not perfect, but nor are any others. They grow and learn and make mistakes and struggle because they are human. What matters is committing to do our best to guide them into adulthood and into the people they want to be. While our overall group quality as parents may become evident in legitimate academic studies, we must not let those studies, good or bad, define us.