Conservative groups have consistently claimed that “Children need a mother and a father.” They have completed many studies showing that kids raised by heterosexual couples grow up happier and more stable than kids raised by gay parents.
Most of the conservative research looked at population studies and compared outcomes for kids raised by gay parents against kids raised in traditional families. They found big differences in how the kids turned out, and used those differences to claim that being raised by gay parents is bad for kids. Period. The problem with all of these studies, according to ThinkProgress, is that they essentially compared apples to oranges. They didn’t bother to look at the stability of the parental relationships. So they compared kids brought up from birth in stable straight homes to kids brought up in gay families that had experienced separation or divorce.
A lot of people thought that the “differences” were caused by the breakups, not the gender of the parents.
At the same time, there were studies done by proponents of gay marriage which found no such disparity. Both sets of children were equally happy and successful adults.
Conservative researchers complained about those finding, though. Since most of the more progressive research had asked for volunteers to participate in their studies, the conservatives complained that the participants were “self-selected”, and weren’t really such a good representation of the real gay parent population. They claimed that the research needed to be based on random samples from the population.
So the Williams Institute at UCLA decided to take up the challenge.
They looked at the kids of 95 gay couples and compared them to 95 straight couples. This time, though, they only compared children who had been brought up from birth in stable, long term relationships.
And guess what?
There were no differences. The young adults turned out to be equally happy, equally educated, equally secure.
The gender of your parents really doesn’t seem to predict how well you’re going to turn out.
We can only hope that this puts an end to this whole discussion and that gay parents can continue to adopt, foster and give birth to happy, healthy kids.
Featured image by Getty/George Frey.
