Lesbians Report That Lesbians Make Good Mothers

Alice Park reported on a study that claims children do better with lesbian mothers than heterosexual parents, whether or not the mother has a partner. Now, before any men try to get out of their fatherhood obligations by bringing this to the attention of family court judges, let's take a closer look at what is really being claimed here. After all, it can't just be a celibate straight woman raising the child by herself. No, according to this, it is important that the woman be attracted to other women. That a child's mother is attracted to other women makes the kid do better in math. Right. Now golf, I could believe.

That is the question researchers explored in the first study ever to track children raised by lesbian parents, from birth to adolescence.

I'm not sure what the wording of this means. Does this mean the kids were raised from birth to adolescence by lesbians, or that they were only tracked through adolescence? From the rest of the article, it appears to mean both. I suppose I should know from the comma.

Although previous studies have indicated that children with same-sex parents show no significant differences compared with children in heterosexual homes when it comes to social development and adjustment, many of those investigations involved children who were born to women in heterosexual marriages, who later divorced and came out as lesbians.

One important detail is what exactly is meant by social development and adjustment, and how that is determined.

For their new study, published on Monday in the journal Pediatrics, researchers Nanette Gartrell, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California at San Francisco (and a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles), and Henry Bos, a behavioral scientist at the 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.

So it appears none of these children were "surprises" or conceived via rape, or otherwise "crisis pregnancies". This is very important. Perhaps the real message is that waiting to have children until you believe you are ready to be a parent makes things better for the child? A child born to a partnered lesbian impregnated through third party reproduction is going to have two women who consider that child their child, unlike how it often can be when a man has been cuckolded and is bitter or comes into a situation where a woman is raising a child from a past lover.

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.

There are so many factors consider for both the homosexual and heterosexual parents – divorce, strife in the relationships, individual flaws, etc.

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.

Self-esteem and confidence aren't necessarily good things – especially when they are unwarranted. Rule-breaking can be a good thing when the rule is unjust. Aggression is not necessarily a bad thing. For example, if a bully is about to beat up a smaller child, perhaps citing that smaller child’s mother being a lesbian, then aggressive intervention on the part of a witness can be a good thing even if the school has a rule against intervening.

In addition, children in same-sex-parent families whose mothers ended up separating did as well as children in lesbian families in which the moms stayed together.

Does anyone really believe this? It means that same-sex divorce has no effect on children. Really, rather than getting this study widely publicized, if I had come up with these results, I would realize that the study is flawed. But due to politics, and the funding already spent by homosexuality advocates on the study, the study gets wide publicity.

The data that Gartrell and Bos analyzed came from the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), begun in 1986. The authors included 154 women in 84 families who underwent artificial insemination to start a family; the parents agreed to answer questions about their children's social skills, academic performance and behavior at five follow-up times over the 17-year study period. Children in the families were interviewed by researchers at age 10 and were then asked at age 17 to complete an online questionnaire, which included queries about the teens' activities, social lives, feelings of anxiety or depression, and behavior.

Where to start?
1. That's an extremely small sample.
2. What about when these kids get older, especially when they consider starting their own family?
3. Are the misandry levels in these children higher than the general population?
4. Is it possible that the researchers doing the interviews were biased?
5. Is it possible that the self-reporting could have been defensive?

Not surprisingly, the researchers found that 41% of children reported having endured some teasing, ostracism or discrimination related to their being raised by same-sex parents.

Unfortunately, some children bully other children for anything they perceive as different. Bullying for whatever reasons is not good, even more so when it is something over which the child has no control.

But Gartrell and Bos could find no differences on psychological adjustment tests between the children and those in a group of matched controls.

This could mean that everyone is getting bullied at pretty much the same rate, regardless of the sexual identity of parents.

I do think is entirely possible that a child raised by two stable women (or one woman) would be better off than one raised by a woman who has a series of bad boys parading through her bedroom and past the breakfast table, possibly taking a detour through the child's room between. But what about situations where a mother and grandmother are raising the children, or a mother and aunt?

Apples need to be compared to apples. Of course a child is likely to be better off raised by a generally good, financially stable woman who planned the pregnancy over an abusive mother and abusive father who are in and out of police custody and spend their money on their substance abuse habits rather than food for the kid, and got pregnant as a natural result of sex without actually intending to become parents. But what about all other things being equal?

The study does not past the smell test. Homosexual people KNOW there is a difference between men and women in interpersonal relationships - that is why they indentify as homosexual and not neutrally bisexual. Parenting is an interpersonal relationship. Therefore, there has to be a difference between mothering and fathering. All children, gay or straight, will grow up to deal with both men and women. As such, they benefit from having a parent of each sex parenting them and modeling cooperative interaction between the sexes.

Use common sense. Does the fact that a woman is attracted to a woman matter? What matters is the behavior towards and in front of the children. Of course a lesbian can be a good mother. What she can't be, though, nor can another woman, is a father.

Because the research is ongoing, Gartrell hopes to test some of these theories with additional studies. She is also hoping to collect more data on gay-father households; gay fatherhood is less common than lesbian motherhood because of the high costs of surrogacy or adoption that gay couples face in order to start a family.

But I thought they were just like bride+groom couples? If they are, some of those couples should be able to make babies without third parties.

Would the same publication publish a study that was funded and released by Focus on the Family in which evangelical Christian parents raised children according to the principles of Focus on the Family, and the study said that such children are better off?