The journal Demography has published a reexamination of a 2010 study that found no significant differences between same-sex and opposite-sex parenting outcomes. William C. Duncan reports:
The journal Demography has just published a very interesting article that reexamines the claims of a 2010 study that suggested (and was widely reported) as showing that children raised by same-sex couples experienced no academic disadvantages. The catch of the earlier study was that it was significantly different from previous studies on same-sex children and their parents since it used a large sample from the Census rather than a small self-selected one which is more typical of this body of research.
As with the Regnerus study, much hinges on who’s included and excluded. Researchers Douglas W. Allen, Catherine Pakaluk, and Joseph Price found a result radically different from that of the initial article:
The 2010 study had excluded children who were not biologically related to the head of household and who were not in the same home for at least five years. This reduced “the sample size by more than one-half.” The 2012 study explains that putting the children who had been in unstable households (lived at the same address less than five years) back into the sample increases the sample “by more than 80 percent.” This fact alone seems important. The new study’s conclusion is that “children being raised by same-sex couples are 35 percent less likely to make normal progress through school.”
Social science won’t settle our moral disagreements, of course. Acknowledging this fact might help both sides read the data with less prejudice and more profit.
November 28th, 2012 | 6:58 pm
At first glance, it’s an awful lot of math that I don’t understand, so this is for what it’s worth . . . .
First, if people want to compare the relationship stability of same-sex couples with opposite-sex couples, why don’t they just do that? Or same-sex couples raising kids with opposite-sex couples raising kids. Instead, as I understand it, they are doing studies of kids being raised by various families and saying, “Oh, by the way, the same-sex couples in our sample were less stable than the opposite-sex couples.” It seems to me the “hidden message” in the Regnerus study and this study was not about how children fared, but about the instability of same-sex relationships.
Second, let’s posit (just for the sake of argument) that the intact family with a married mother and father is the gold standard. The problem with using that as an argument against same-sex marriage is that you can’t predict which heterosexual couples who marry will stay together, and you can’t predict which same-sex couples who marry will stay together. So when faced with actual couples wishing to marry, you can make statistical projections about them (assuming you have enough data). But you can’t predict that a same-sex family won’t have kids that excel in school and an opposite-sex family won’t have kids that fail (and become drug addicts and murderers).
It’s like comparing the math scores on SAT tests for boys and girls. The boys as a group outscore the girls, but you would never conclude from that a girl won’t be at the top of her math class. In a representative group, there will always be girls who are excellent mathematicians and boys who are poor ones.
It strikes me that this is a potential way of discriminating. There are many things that can be predicted statistically in large groups that we would not think of using to form public policy.
November 28th, 2012 | 7:05 pm
One further point. I am over the fifteen years or so when the first no-fault divorce bill was signed in California and all the succeeding states adopted their own bills, the evidence that already existed regarding the harmful effects of divorce on children continued to mount higher and higher. But did the authors of each damning study say their results would be “relevant for current and future policy debates”?
November 28th, 2012 | 7:36 pm
The conclusion of this important research that, “with respect to normal school progress, children residing in same-sex households can be distinguished statistically from those in traditional married homes and in heterosexual cohabiting households,” is consistent with Sarantakos’ well designed study of 174 primary school children in Australia.
In this study of 58 children in married families, 58 in heterosexual cohabitating and 58 in homosexual unions, married couples offered the best environment for a child’s social and education environment, followed by cohabiting couples and finally by homosexual couples. (1.)
These important research studies and others should be considered by all Americans before marriage is redefined and children are deliberately deprived children of their right to and need for a mother and a father.
1. Sarantakos, S. (1996) Children in three contexts. Children Australia, 21(3), 23-31.
November 28th, 2012 | 10:36 pm
It should always be about the children but sadly the adults are so driven by their own ‘needs’ it isn’t considered. Instead of teaching sex ed in schools it would seem a much better use of the time inculcating information about how important it is to form oneself to be a responsible human being first and then to understand how marriage affects any children, whether adopted or naturally born.
The children are the ones who suffer from adults who care for them if they themselves don’t have the mindset needed to understand the needs of children. Even though when Jesus said ‘Suffer the children to come unto me and forbid them not’ He didn’t mean that the children SHOULD have to suffer just for coming into this world.
November 28th, 2012 | 10:54 pm
If only social scientists would do a revision and critical evaluation of the method employed to manipulate data and results concerning every single study claiming that homosexuality is “normal” – not just this one.
It seems that people who normalize homosexuality (and that includes most if not all social scientists with a homosexualist ideology) are either incapable or unwilling to do so.
Given that homosexual agenda social scientists – like other social scientists – are trained to criticize research methods, one can only conclude they lack the ethics to do it, and it is thus not a mere lack of capability, since it would mean exposing any such study as having been manipulated to produce false claims that support their homosexualist ideology.
Science!
November 28th, 2012 | 11:12 pm
Reta said: Even though when Jesus said ‘Suffer the children to come unto me and forbid them not’ He didn’t mean that the children SHOULD have to suffer just for coming into this world.
============
Exactly.
Let’s take the case of the surrogate mother for homosexual men wanting to manufacture a child. She is nothing more than an incubator for two homosexuals who, in agreement with her, are going to take the baby away from its very mother.
In other words, all adults in the picture are happily violating the child’s right to a loving mother and father, as a couple. And they will violate the right of the child to bond and to be taken care of by its very own mother, because some men are too deformed to establish relationships with women, and too unethical to seek a solution for their psychological problems.
Thus they feel entitled to inflict any harm or privation of the experience of having a mother and father to any baby they have enough money and means to “manufacture.” The baby’s conception is an industrialized production, because it cannot be conceived out of love.
Every kind of suffering or emotional hindrance caused to the child is simply dismissed by people in support of normalizing homosexuality.
Who can say how much privation a baby experiences if it is never able to be held by, to be loved by, to bond with its mother – and continuing with this privation during its most important formative years and then for the rest of its life?
Homosexuals with a homosexualist ideology are too uncaring and insensitive to ask or answer this question. I believe such an experience with one’s mother cannot be replaced in an identical way, that is, there is no replacement available. While it can be partially made up for in other ways, what a poor substitute we have with a person who cannot even respect the rights and needs of the child (homosexuals) and feels entitled to deprive children in any way that is convenient for them.
November 29th, 2012 | 5:24 am
The question of Same-Sex Marriage cannot be treated in isolation from those of adoption and assisted reproduction. At all events, the countries that have made marriage accessible to same-sex couples have all authorized adoption by such couples and developed systems of assisted conception – even surrogate gestation – to enable such couples to have children.
Given the principle of the Civil Law that “Only things in trade can be the subject of an agreement” I suppose we are now to regard children, along with human genetic material, as articles of commerce.
It is worth noting that it is secular France that has resolutely opposed these developments, restricting infertility treatment to pathological conditions, outlawing surrogacy and restricting joint adoption to married (opposite-sex) couples, while providing in its Civil Code that “The human body, its elements and its products may not form the subject of a patrimonial right” and that “All agreements relating to procreation or gestation on account of a third party are void.”
November 29th, 2012 | 9:53 am
Michael PS,
As I have argued above, even if we accept that children raised by same-sex couples, on average, fare less well than children raised by opposite-sex married couples, it would be discrimination to automatically deny adoption to same-sex couples. Each adoptive home is investigated very thoroughly. While it might be the case that same-sex and opposite-sex parenting has statistically different outcomes, you can’t predict results for individual same-sex couples or opposite-sex couples.
“According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, one in three black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.” Should such a statistic be used to rule out black married couples seeking to adopt? Also marriages between black men and white women are much more likely to fail than marriages between white men and black women, or marriage where the husband and wife are the same race. Should adoption agencies just rule out couples where the father is black and the wife is white? No, that is clearly racial discrimination, since even thought the statistics may be perfectly accurate, you judge people as individuals, not as members of statistical groups.
November 29th, 2012 | 10:40 am
David Nickol
But here we are dealing, not merely with statistical correlations, but with psychoanalytic theory, stretching back over a century and grounded in clinical case-studies, which provide a model of child development.
Thus, the eminent psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, Pierre Lévy-Soussan, (a former student of Lacan) told the Pércresse commission: “It is in the child’s best interests to join a nuclear family that is already socially accepted so that he or she does not have to take on the additional task, following a history of abandonment, of adapting to a family that is, for whatever reason, ‘non-standard’.” He believes that in order to be successful, adoption must lead to a psychological filiation that “allows for a nexus of the three elements that are basic to any society: the biological, the social and the subjective dimensions specific to human beings. The psychological strength of this construction exceeds the purely biological connection of filiation and provides it with security. The security and ‘truth’ of this filiation are based on childbirth, on a potential or actual procreative relationship between a man and a woman, allowing the fictional filiation through the encounter with the other sex, alive and of the same generation. The fictional filiation can then be experienced as true, consistent and reasonable.”The difference in sex between the two members of the parental couple thus seems to him indispensable, if the adoption “graft” is to take.
Obviously, we cannot conflate adoption with cases of children raised by a biological parent and his or her same-sex partner, or, especially in the case of older children, an existing carer.
November 29th, 2012 | 11:58 am
Michael PS,
I think that most of the people who argue here against same-sex marriage and same-sex parenting are even less likely to have any use for psychoanalytic theory that I do. (I revere Freud as a genius, but much of psychoanalysis does not hold up.)
The point is that in such matters as adoption, these kinds of factors are determinative when all other things are equal. When a limited number of potential adoptive parents are available, it is necessary to choose from what’s there, not hold out for ideals. And as I pointed out, whatever psychoanalytic theory has to say, studies like this are only statistical. The majority of children raised by same-sex couples will turn out just fine. And some of the children raised by married heterosexual couples will turn out very badly. When placing a child for adoption, it would be foolish (and discriminatory) to choose a heterosexual married couple you have serious doubts about over a same-sex couple who pass all the evaluations with flying colors.
Single-parent adoption has been on the rise for some time now. If we know with such great assurance that married heterosexual couples are the ideal parents, why don’t we prohibit single-parent adoption?
November 29th, 2012 | 4:59 pm
David Nickol wrote: Each adoptive home is investigated very thoroughly.
==========
For proof, all one needs to do is to look at the Frank Lombard case.
“One of the most horrific cases I have covered here in Hicktown is the one involving pedophile, Frank Lombard. I get sick all over again when I think of how he acted as a predator, purposely targeting black male babies to adopt, so that he could rape and sodomize and pimp them out to strangers who could have AIDS or could be murderers.”
http://www.hicktownpress.com/pedophile-frank-lombard-sentenced-to-27-years/
If Lombard hadn’t gone on the Internet to brag about abusing his son and offering him to other homosexual pedophiles, he could have raped his adopted son to death for all society and adoption agencies were aware of or cared to investigate.
November 29th, 2012 | 7:18 pm
David,
“But did the authors of each damning study say their results would be “relevant for current and future policy debates”?”
I don’t get your point here. Please explain.
November 29th, 2012 | 7:36 pm
Rick,
“In this study of 58 children in married families, 58 in heterosexual cohabitating and 58 in homosexual unions, married couples offered the best environment for a child’s social and education environment, followed by cohabiting couples and finally by homosexual couples”
These studies are not adequately controlled for the kind of family. Gay families should be compared not to straight families but to straight families that acquired their children through remarriage, adoption, or surrogacy.
Adopted children, for example, have higher rates of learning disabilities, misbehavior, etc. If you compare gay families to straight families that haven’t adopted, you might ascribe to the parents a problem that actually stems from adoption.
Of the 116 straight families in the Australian study, how many were raising children from a previous marriage or were raising adopted or surrogate children? I suspect that the number was small enough to skew the results. I’d also be interested to know how old the kids were.
November 29th, 2012 | 7:44 pm
Heather,
“Let’s take the case of the surrogate mother for homosexual men wanting to manufacture a child. She is nothing more than an incubator for two homosexuals who, in agreement with her, are going to take the baby away from its very mother”
Yes, the surrogate mother could very well be compared to Hagar, couldn’t she?
November 29th, 2012 | 7:54 pm
My question would be – do the children parented by same sex couples compare less favorably progressing through school than children parented by opposite sex couples because of the parenting or because of the prejudices and judgement of society which itself must be a contributory factor? Furthermore, how is ‘normal progress’ defined?
November 29th, 2012 | 9:47 pm
Even if it were true that gay people are worse parents, so what? It’s legal in all 50 states for gay people to be parents, and that’s not likely to change. We would have to stop a lot of straight people from being parents, too, if we stopped gay people. There are certainly worse straight characteristics than gay characteristics!
Since gay couples are already raising children, it would be best for the children that their parents get married. Marriage brings stability to a family.
November 30th, 2012 | 12:46 am
Heather wrote: “Let’s take the case of the surrogate mother for homosexual men wanting to manufacture a child. She is nothing more than an incubator for two homosexuals who, in agreement with her, are going to take the baby away from its very mother”
Michael wrote: Yes, the surrogate mother could very well be compared to Hagar, couldn’t she?
Hagar agreed to have two men who are too deformed to establish relationships with women to manufacture a baby and purposefully take it away from its mother?
Your comment does not explicit your position on the issue.
Are you in favor of having babies being taken away from their mothers? Do you rejoice a lot when it happens? Do you think mothers are throw-away things? Do you endorse the practice of homosexuals taking babies away from their mothers?
November 30th, 2012 | 3:05 am
David Nickol
But there is no shortage of adoptive parents.
According to the Pécresse mission, in France, 4,500 adoptions were pronounced in 2003. Among these, 500 involved wards of the French state and the other 4,000 involved children born abroad. The United States imports some 20,000 a year.
Consider the following testimony from Professor Françoise Dekeuwer-Defossez, a leading jurist and formerly professor of Civil Law at the University of Lille, who reported some practices that equate adoption with the purchase of children: “Others much better qualified than I am could also talk to you about the financial abuses associated with adoptions abroad, the adopters’ first move being to see their banker. In the meantime, other countries are not going to continue sending us children indefinitely under the current dubious conditions.”
The Pécresse mission commented “Obviously, the despair of some couples in wealthier countries that yearn for a child makes them easy prey for unscrupulous individuals who do not hesitate to sell children to Westerners.”
This suggests that demand greatly exceeds supply.
November 30th, 2012 | 10:15 am
This suggests that demand greatly exceeds supply.
Michael PS,
In the United States, there is a great demand for adoptable white babies, but there is a shortage of adoptive parents for children of color, special needs children, and older children. It is generally acknowledge that gay and lesbian parents are more willing to adopt special needs children.
November 30th, 2012 | 10:36 am
Michael,
I think you are incorrect here. You are asking me to scientifically unconfound what those with SSA themselves have confounded. You are missing this point: Those with SSA who will raise a biological child together must—must—have had some kind of a relationship (marriage, cohabitation, one-night-stand) with a woman (if the child was naturally conceived). This, then, is a disordered situation for the child (by disordered I mean thrusting the child into at least two family situations, which is not fair to the child). You are now asking the research community to deliberately study disordered situations for heterosexual partners raising children. Yet, this is not the norm for heterosexual couples. It will always—always—be the case with SSA couples who raise a child conceived naturally.
November 30th, 2012 | 11:55 am
You are now asking the research community to deliberately study disordered situations for heterosexual partners raising children. Yet, this is not the norm for heterosexual couples.
Dr. Rick Fitzgibbons,
But the norm for the country as a whole is not intact families of heterosexual married couples raising their children from birth to adulthood. You want to judge same-sex parenting not against reality, but against an ideal situation. If you really want to compare same-sex-couple parenting to opposite-sex-couple parenting, you have to keep all other variables for both groups the same.
If all the children of the same-sex couples are adopted, for example, it wouldn’t be right to compare them to the biological children of heterosexual couples. Otherwise you may very will just be comparing the effects of being adopted, not on the effects of being raised by same-sex parents.
November 30th, 2012 | 3:28 pm
Rick,
“You are now asking the research community to deliberately study disordered situations for heterosexual partners raising children. Yet, this is not the norm for heterosexual couples.”
You act like this is a big deal. Don’t we already have plenty of data about the effects of raising children with stepparents rather than biological parents? All I’m saying is that gay parents raising children from another marriage should be compared to stepfamilies rather than biological families.
You can call both situations disordered if you want to, but I would think you’d want to know whether any difference were due to having gay parents or to having a non-biological parent.
It also matters how many gay families were formed from one source or another. How many children remained with one biological parent, how many were adopted, and how many are products of surrogates? If the sample is skewed one way or another, that might make a difference.
Scientists are trained to care about variables.
November 30th, 2012 | 3:43 pm
Heather,
“Hagar agreed to have two men who are too deformed to establish relationships with women to manufacture a baby and purposefully take it away from its mother?”
No, she didn’t. Do you know the Hagar story?
Abraham “manufactured” a baby with his slave and “purposefully took it away from its mother” so that his real wife could raise him.
Are you capable of seeing the parallel?
“Are you in favor of having babies being taken away from their mothers?”
No, I’m not, and I’ve had this argument with both straight and gay friends who have chosen surrogacy. I think children belong with their biological parents, and I would prohibit all surrogacies. I find it hypocritical that some would prohibit surrogacy only for gays and still allow straights to employ it. I’ve adopted three children, and so I know intimately how much children crave their biological parents, no matter the circumstances. I am also horrified by the practice of some Christian conservative crisis pregnancy centers that try to coerce single women to give up their children.
“Your comment does not explicit your position on the issue”
I was being purposefully opaque. Every once in awhile we have someone burst into the comment boxes throwing insults every which way, and I find such behavior simply tiresome. A little civil conversation with people you disagree with is a good thing.
November 30th, 2012 | 4:44 pm
David,
I am sorry, but you are not getting my point. You are presuming that I–a potential researcher–am deliberately creating a confound with my suggestion that intact heterosexual families should be compared, in the case of Sarantakos, with same-sex families with children who are from a former heterosexual union and now are with two men or two women. I am not creating such a confound. I am asking a more subtle question and it is this: Can we compare what is—what normatively is—within the heterosexual family situation (one mother and one father) with what is—what normatively is—in the same-sex parenting community, which always and without exception will be this: children who have been in a heterosexual parenting situation and now—it will always include the word “and” if we are talking about the Sarantakos design—in a same-sex parenting situation.
Otherwise, you wish for the social scientific community to compare what everyone on this planet knows is a disadvantage for children in the heterosexual parenting situation (a broken home) with what is normative in the same-sex parent home.
November 30th, 2012 | 7:35 pm
Michael,
Here is the essential problem with your thinking: You want to drag down the traditional family unit to the level of same-sex unions that once included a heterosexual partner and now does not.
Here is an analogy. Suppose someone strove for “homeless people’s rights” by saying that homelessness is not a problem and it is only a problem in the mind of those who have homelessphobia. To prove that homeless people are no more affected by their state in life than traditional moms and dads the advocate suggests this study:
Let us equate the two groups because right now there is a scientific confound: one group is in a cozy home and the other stays in the alley at night. If we want to truly measure the self-esteem and level of depression of the homeless, let us make traditional moms and dads stay outside in the alley all night for 6 months and then we will see that the two groups (traditional moms and dads vs the homeless) are the same.
Well, they probably would be the same because now each is sharing the problem of the homeless.
It is the same when the advocates insist that traditional parents must look like same-sex couples by having at least one family break-up. When the traditional ones are brought down to a worse level they will look like the same-sex couple. Then instead of the scientist saying, “Well, you brought down the traditional family unit,” the advocates instead want to say, “See, the same-sex couple must be at least as elevated as the traditional family couple because they have the same scores on the test.”
December 1st, 2012 | 10:57 am
Doctor Rick, you’d make a lousy researcher. If you want to compare apples to apples, you have to have comparable test and control groups! You can’t compare intact marriages to broken marriages and then blame negative outcomes on sexual orientation. That’s what Mark Regnerus did, and he’s now a laughing stock in the sociology community. You have to control for all variables but the one you want to scrutinize. Similarly, you can’t compare wealthy white suburban families to poor black urban families, and then describe the differences on race along. That’s essentially what Mark Regnerus did. Epic fail. This guy will be lucky to hold onto his job with such amateurish research behavior. But he had an agenda and he had to bundle some bad variables with “being gay,” in order to reach the conclusion that gay parents were lousy parents.
December 1st, 2012 | 6:46 pm
Robert,
You want to artificially equate the two groups and this is disingenuous. If a man with SSA wants to raise his own naturally-conceived-child and do so with another man with SSA, he has to—has to—have been in a relationship, that now has ended, with a woman. What is it about this that you do not understand? This is the normative situation. Robert, I want to repeat that previous sentence: This is the normative situation. I ask only for fairness, which is this: Let us now compare one normative situation with another normative situation (one mand and one woman in a stable relationship raising the child. My earlier post about the homeless stands. You are missing the subtlety of this either because you do not see it, in which case discourse with you is futile until you do the work to see it, or you deliberately choose not to see it. Oh, and one more thing: Please refrain from the ad hominem attacks unless you wish for the readers to see that you have no argument at all.
December 1st, 2012 | 7:13 pm
Oops, typo in previous comment. Should read ( (one man and one woman in a stable relationship raising the child).
December 3rd, 2012 | 2:46 pm
Rick,
So it’s an ad hominem attack if someone points out that a bad researcher fails to control the variables, but it’s fair for you to claim that Robert is “disingenuous”?
Interesting.
December 4th, 2012 | 4:23 am
It is always telling to look at the authors. No surprise that 3 economists with strong religious backgrounds came up with this rubbish!
Note the Author affiliations
1. Department of Economics, Simon Fraser University, 8888 University Drive, Burnaby, BC, V5A 1S6, Canada
[Douglas Allen is a creationist christian who is an economics professor http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/
2. Department of Economics, Ave Maria University, Ave Maria, FL, USA
[Ave Maria University is a private Catholic university in southwest Florida, United States, founded in 2003 and Pakaluk is a "christian" and also an economist! http://blog.avemaria.edu/post/17053660450/catherinepakaluk
3. Department of Economics, Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, USA
[Brigham Young University is a private university located in Provo, Utah. It is owned and operated by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and is the United States' largest religious university and third-largest private university - a mormon and again an economist.]
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