Same-Sex and Different-Sex Parent Households and Child Health Outcomes

Abstract

Children with female same-sex parents and different-sex parents demonstrated no differences in outcomes, despite female same-sex parents reporting more parenting stress. Future studies may reveal the sources of this parenting stress.

Moving Beyond Anti-LGBT Politics

“…9 The study therefore corroborates the "no differences" conclusions that have been reached by at least 73 other scholarly studies, according to the Columbia Law School's What We Know Project, which continuously collects scholarship on this issue. Focusing on female same-sex parents who have been continuously coupled, they find that, although such couples report more parenting stress, their children "demonstrate no differences in general health, emotional difficulties, coping behavior, and learning behavior from children reared in different-sex parent households."…”

Family Diversity and Child Health: Where Do Same‐Sex Couple Families Fit?

“…Significantly, we join a recent body of literature (Badgett et al, 2013;Bos et al, 2016;Goldberg et al, 2014;Reczek et al, 2016) in documenting the heterogeneity of same-sex couple families with children in terms of race and ethnicity as well as socioeconomic characteristics. Same-sex couple families are not monolithic, and their sociodemographic heterogeneity is underscored by the differences in the ways these families with children are formed.…”

“…Prior research on the children of same-sex couples has focused on lesbian families (Bos et al, 2007(Bos et al, , 2016Gartrell & Bos, 2010;Wainright & Patterson, 2006, 2008. Much less work has focused on children with gay fathers, often because the number of gay father families in nationally representative data sets has been insufficient to produce reliable estimates (Patterson, 2006).…”

“…Children's physical health, in particular, has been significantly underrepresented in the extant literature on family structure and children's outcomes. Among the existing studies of family structure and children's health, the majority have excluded same-sex couple families, placed them into an "other" or "unmarried couple" category, with a few exceptions (see Bos, Knox, van Rijn-van Gelderen, & Gartrell, 2016;Reczek, Spiker, Liu, & Crosnoe, 2016), or omitted important comparisons between nontraditional families, such as single-parent and same-sex couple families (Reczek et al, 2016). Consequently, we have a limited understanding of the extent to which family diversity matters for child health.…”

“…Extensive backlash resulted within the scholarly community, largely revolving around the methods used to adjudicate children who were and were not in same-sex couple families (adams & Light, 2015), a problem that has long plagued studies of children in same-sex couple families (Schumm, 2012). There are the following three primary reasons for this: first, standard surveys have often not included the kinds of measures needed to determine same-sex couple families (i.e., household rosters including gender and the relationship of everyone in the household to each other; Allen, 2015); second, few nationally representative studies have contained measures that allow for the identification of same-sex romantic partners; and, finally, even fewer large national data sets have had sample sizes sufficient to create estimates for children in same-sex couple families, with a few notable exceptions (see Bos et al, 2016;Reczek et al, 2016; and for reviews of these issues, see Allen, 2015;Umberson, Thomeer, Kroeger, Lodge, & Xu, 2015).…”