Why Gay Parents May be The Best Parents

There is very little research on the children of gay men, so Stacey and Biblarz couldn’t draw conclusions on those families. But Stacey suspects that gay men “will be the best parents on average,” she said.

That’s a speculation, she said, but if lesbian parents have to really plan to have a child, it’s even harder for gay men. Those who decide to do it are thus likely to be extremely committed, Stacey said.Gay men may also experience fewer parenting conflicts, she added. Most lesbians use donor sperm to have a child, so one mother is biological and the other is not, which could create conflict because one mother may feel closer to the kid.

“With gay men, you don’t have that factor,” she said. “Neither of them gets pregnant, neither of them breast-feeds, so you don’t have that asymmetry built into the relationship.”

The bottom line, Stacey said, is that people who say children need both a father and a mother in the home are misrepresenting the research, most of which compares children of single parents to children of married couples. Two good parents are better than one good parent, Stacey said, but one good parent is better than two bad parents. And gender seems to make no difference. While you do find broad differences between how men and women parent on average, she said, there is much more diversity within the genders than between them.

“Two heterosexual parents of the same educational background, class, race and religion are more like each other in the way they parent than one is like all other women and one is like all other men,” she said. [6 Gender Myths Busted]

Nurturing tolerance

In fact, the only consistent places you find differences between how kids of gay parents and kids of straight parents turn out are in issues of tolerance and open-mindedness, according to Goldberg. In a paper published in 2007 in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry, Goldberg conducted in-depth interviews with 46 adults with at least one gay parent. Twenty-eight of them spontaneously offered that they felt more open-minded and empathetic than people not raised in their situation.

“These individuals feel like their perspectives on family, on gender, on sexuality have largely been enhanced by growing up with gay parents,” Goldberg said.

One 33-year-old man with a lesbian mother told Goldberg, “I feel I’m a more open, well-rounded person for having been raised in a nontraditional family, and I think those that know me would agree. My mom opened me up to the positive impact of differences in people.”

Children of gay parents also reported feeling less stymied by gender stereotypes than they would have been if raised in straight households. That’s likely because gays and lesbians tend to have more egalitarian relationships than straight couples, Goldberg said. They’re also less wedded to rigidgender stereotypes themselves.

“Men and women felt like they were free to pursue a wide range of interests,” Goldberg said. “Nobody was telling them, ‘Oh, you can’t do that, that’s a boy thing,’ or ‘That’s a girl thing.’”

Same-sex acceptance

If same-sex marriage does disadvantage kids in any way, it has nothing to do with their parent’s gender and everything to do with society’s reaction toward the families, said Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, the author of “Counted Out: Same-Sex Relations and Americans’ Definitions of Family” (Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).

“Imagine being a child living in a state with two parents in which, legally, only one parent is allowed to be their parent,” Powell told LiveScience. “In that situation, the family is not seen as authentic or real by others. That would be the disadvantage.”

In her research, Goldberg has found that many children of gay and lesbian parents say that more acceptance of gay and lesbian families, not less, would help solve this problem.

In a study published online Jan. 11, 2012, in the Journal of Marriage and Family, Goldberg interviewed another group of 49 teenagers and young adults with gay parents and found that not one of them rejected the right of gays and lesbians to marry. Most cited legal benefits as well as social acceptance.

“I was just thinking about this with a couple of friends and just was in tears thinking about how different my childhood might have been had same-sex marriage been legalized 25 years ago,” a 23-year-old man raised by a lesbian couple told Goldberg. “The cultural, legal status of same-sex couples impacts the family narratives of same-sex families — how we see ourselves in relation to the larger culture, whether we see ourselves as accepted or outsiders.”