A new study on the health of children with two moms is the first to use a nationally representative survey to compare only children whose parents have been in a continuous relationship. It concludes they’re doing just fine, thank you.
“Same-sex and Different-sex Parent Households and Child Health Outcomes: Findings from the National Survey of Children’s Health,” was published in the April 2016 issue of the peer-reviewed Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics. The study’s authors, Dr. Henny Bos, Justin Knox, MPH, Dr. Loes van Rijn-van Gelderen, and Dr. Nanette Gartrell (all affiliated with UCLA’s Williams Institute), looked at 95 households with continuously coupled same-sex (female) parents and 95 with continuously coupled different-sex parents, and compared “spouse/partner relationships and parent-child relationships (family relationships), parenting stress, and children’s general health, emotional difficulties, coping behavior, and learning behavior (child outcomes).”
Children with female same-sex parents and different-sex parents demonstrated no differences in outcomes, despite female same-sex parents reporting more parenting stress.
Their findings? “Children with female same-sex parents and different-sex parents demonstrated no differences in outcomes, despite female same-sex parents reporting more parenting stress.”
One of the strengths of the study was its use of the federal National Survey of Children’s Health (NSCH) from 2011—2012, a nationally representative population-based survey. The NSCH was approved by the National Center for Health Statistics of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and “was not described to participants as a study of same-sex parent families,” Bos and her colleagues write, “thus minimizing potential bias.” The downside was that in this data, the authors were only able to identify a small number of households with two dads raising kids under 18. They therefore focused only on two-mom households.
Another strength of the current study was in comparing only families where the parents were continuously coupled. You may recall that a 2012 study by Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas was widely discredited for including any children whose parents had ever been in a same-sex relationship, regardless of how long and regardless of other family circumstances (divorce, etc.) In fact, of the 78 studies on children with same-sex parents identified by Columbia Law School’s [Updated] Cornell University’s What We Know project, the only four that found those children faced higher risks also used the same flawed methodology.
And the world’s largest study of families with same-sex parents, the Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families, while it found the children were doing just as well as any others, was a convenience sample of volunteer participants, rather than a fully representative sample across the population.
Bos and her colleagues therefore did an apples-to-apples comparison based on a representative sample to put a stop to any naysayers—and found what many of us would have expected. There is still more work to be done, of course, on two-dad families, on transgender parents, and on the specific ways we form and nurture our families and deal with the stigma many of us still face. But those who doubt LGBTQ people are as capable of being good parents as any others are finding fewer and fewer arguments to make.