Ideals, negotiations and gender roles in gay and lesbian co-parenting arrangements

Abstract

This paper engages with the complex gender and parental dynamics experienced in the context of co-parenting arrangements. These arrangements, based on mutual agreement, involve people who commit to raising a child together, possibly with their respective partners. These family forms are usually pursued to avoid what is perceived as the uncertainty surrounding alternative assisted reproductive options such as donor insemination or surrogacy, and to allow the child to have two biological and sexually differentiated parental figures. This paper explores some of the opportunities and challenges presented by co-parenting by focusing on the experiences and accounts of lesbian women and gay men engaged in such family arrangements. Drawing on work by social theorists of the family, the main characteristics of these arrangements are first examined to show that while co-parenting might first seem marginal, it appears particularly well adapted to contemporary social constraints and parenting expectations. The second part of the paper shows how in practice, dominant gender norms remain largely unquestioned and can lead to tensions and unbalanced parental power relationships between biological parents, which in turn, can present a significant challenge to these family arrangements. The analysis therefore suggests that while co-parenting offers the potential for parents to reconcile contradictory social expectations and provide them with opportunities to create family practices that suit them, these are restrained by existing gender norms, in particular by the prevailing role of the biological mother.

Italian same‐sex parenting in times of COVID‐19: Constructing parenthood on insecure grounds

“…These situations arise when two or more individuals raise children together even though they are not in a partnered relationship. More specifically, a homosexual person (or a same-sex couple) can make an agreement (not always formalized) with a heterosexual couple or with a single parent to share parental responsibilities (e.g., Herbrand, 2018;Muzio, 1993).…”

Review article: Parenting leaves, workplace characteristics, male health, and the pandemic: Currents in policy-related fatherhood research in higher income countries

“…Arguably, this is because the binary biological category 'male/female' remains a key empirical predictor of many aspects of parenting practice on average at societal level. This can also be true for same-sex parenting couples, who may also adopt the gender binary (masculine/feminine) within their parenting practices, remaining constrained by prevailing gender norms (Herbrand, 2018). Some of this is linked to body practices, such as pregnancy and breastfeeding, which have long shaped our normative frameworks and accompanying policies, but other aspects are concerned with the social constructs of 'care' and 'breadwinning'.…”

What We Know and What Remains to Be Explored about LGBTQ Parent Families in Israel: A Sociocultural Perspective

“…In recent decades, a large body of research has been conducted on diverse LGBTQ parent family forms, including lesbian and gay stepfamilies formed post heterosexual relationship dissolution [ 9 ], lesbian-parent families through donor insemination [ 2 ], LGBTQ parent families created by adoption [ 10 ], shared parenting arrangements between gay and lesbian individuals [ 11 ], and gay men becoming fathers through surrogacy [ 12 ]. The topics investigated in the existing research range from child adjustment in LGBTQ parent families to the well-being of the parents, with results showing that parents’ sexual orientation does not have a detrimental effect on the adjustment of either sexual minority parents or their children, e.g., [ 13 , 14 , 15 ].…”