Children of *Middle-Class* Lesbians May Do Better Than Their Peers
From Time magazine this morning come the results of a long-running longitudinal study about the relative well-being of the children of lesbian parents, as compared to straight parents:
For their new study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at University of California, San Francisco (and a law professor at University of California, Los Angeles), and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at University of Amsterdam, focused on what they call planned lesbian families — households in which the mothers identified themselves as lesbian at the time of artificial insemination.Data on such families are sparse, but they are important for establishing whether a child’s environment in a home with same-sex parents would be any more or less nurturing than one with a heterosexual couple.
The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression.
But the Time article does not mention the demographic breakdown of the lesbian-mom sample, and I have to wonder how far that sample is likely to skew towards the white, the middle-class, and the well-educated. Coming out still takes a certain amount of privilege in American society: you need a job that will not fire you, a family or surrogate family that will not reject you, and an environment that will afford some sort of physical safety. To raise a family as a single parent or half of a same-sex couple is even more difficult, and requires larger doses of the sort of social capital that coming out requires. What’s more is that this social capital in our country tends to correlate with racial privilege, educational privilege, class privilege, etc.—as does children’s self-esteem, academic achievement, and behavior. If the children of lesbian parents are on average scoring higher in these areas, it may not have anything to do with their parents’ sexual orientation, and more to do with the fact that lesbian parents who will volunteer to participate in a university study about lesbian parenting are very much more likely to be possessed of an assortment of trappings of privilege than a given sample of the population at large, leading to higher-achieving kids. In addition, artificial insemination, in vitro, and the various medical costs associated with having a child as a single parent or lesbian couple which this study is particularly looking at are extraordinarily expensive, and virtually impossible to do without very good health insurance, which again necessitates landing somewhere in the middle or even upper-middle class.
This is not to say that none of these results have anything at all to do with sexual orientation; my guess is that a kid who constantly has to defend the difference of his or her parents is going to develop a little more assertiveness. It’s hard to be different when you’re a kid at school, and having to be the school spokesperson for equality and acceptance is bound to give you a thicker skin and maybe even a little more drive.
But I’m still inclined to think that more of this is to do with the related demographics than it is with sexual orientation itself. I imagine this is something that the social scientists running the study are looking at and controlling for, but it’s poor reporting and poor understanding of social science on Time‘s part for not pointing that out.
Emily is a staff writer for Campus Progress. She attends Princeton University.
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