Tag Archives: parenting

New evidence that children fare better with married parents of the opposite sex

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That children need a female mother and male father who are married to each other used to be a matter of common sense. That kind of sense is less common these days but a new study confirms conventional parenting wisdom.

Read it all here:

There is a new and significant piece of evidence in the social science debate about gay parenting and the unique contributions that mothers and fathers make to their children’s flourishing. A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.

[…..]

children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.

[…..]

the particular gender mix of a same-sex household has a dramatic difference in the association with child graduation. Consider the case of girls. . . . Regardless of the controls and whether or not girls are currently living in a gay or lesbian household, the odds of graduating from high school are considerably lower than any other household type. Indeed, girls living in gay households are only 15 percent as likely to graduate compared to girls from opposite sex married homes.

Shocking discovery: children are influenced by their parents

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Including lesbian parents. A recent study reveals that girls brought up by a lesbian couple are more likely to engage in same sex activities than those brought up by a straight (I almost wrote “normal” – horror of horrors) couple.

Now the excuse can shift from “God made me this way” to “my parents made me this way”.

From here:

The study was part of an ongoing study that, at this stage, involved 77 families, “31 continuously-coupled, 40 separated-mother, and six single-mother families,” and 78 17-year-old children (one family had twins). Of the girls, nearly 50% described themselves as at least partly homosexual in orientation, though 30% out of that 50% were “predominantly heterosexual, incidentally homosexual.” (None of the girls, though, identified themselves as predominantly or exclusively lesbian.) Of the boys, a bit over 20% described themselves as at least partly homosexual in orientation, though 13% out of that 20% described themselves as “predominantly heterosexual, incidentally homosexual.” (Two of the boys identified themselves as predominantly or exclusively gay.) “The … Kinsey self-identifications [of the girls in the study] and lifetime sexual experiences were consistent with Stacey and Biblarz’s (2001) and Biblarz and Stacey’s (2010) theory that the offspring of lesbian and gay parents might be more open to homoerotic exploration and same-sex orientation.”

As to actual sexual behavior, 15% of the girls had had sex with other girls, compared to 5% in a sample of 17-year-old girls at large; 54% of the girls had had sex with boys, compared to 63% in a sample of 17-year-old girls at large. The boys showed no greater participation in homosexual sex compared to the sample of 17-year-old boys at large, but showed a markedly lesser participation in heterosexual sex (38% as opposed to 59%). For both the boys and girls who had had sex, the age of first sexual contact was about a year later than in the samples of 17-year-olds at large. All these differences are statistically significant.

h/t Big Blue Wave