U.S. CENSUS DATA

One in five male couples and one in three lesbian couples were raising children as of the 2000 Census. That’s way up from 1990, when one in 20 male couples and one in five lesbian couples had kids.

A NEW PUBLISHED CLINICAL STUDY

And new research now shows that children raised by same-sex couples appear to do as well as those raised by parents of both sexes,  challenging the long-ingrained belief that children need male and female parents for healthy adjustment.

“It’s more about the quality of the parenting than the gender of the parents,” says Judith Stacey of New York University, co-author of the comprehensive review. It will be published Friday in the Journal of Marriage and Family.

“Children being raised by same-gender parents, on most all of the measures that we care about, self-esteem, school performance, social adjustment and so on, seem to be doing just fine and, in most cases, are statistically indistinguishable from kids raised by married moms and dads on these measures.” 

In addition to child outcomes, the sociologists reviewed parenting styles and found “two women who choose to parent together are slightly more likely than a heterosexual couple to be actively committed to hands-on parenting.

A NEW PUBLISHED RESEARCH BOOK

Also, there’s another new comprehensive study being published in a book called Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children: Research on the Family Life Cycle, by Abbie Goldberg, an assistant professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

Among findings outlined in Goldberg’s book:

• The transition to parenthood is similar for both homosexual couples and heterosexual couples.

• Children of gay couples don’t differ from their peers raised by heterosexual couples in terms of their mental health, self-esteem, life satisfaction, social skills or number of friends.

• Children in gay families are teased more about their families and their sexuality but are not teased more overall.

Stephanie Woolley-Larrea, 36, of Miami says she and her partner, Mary Larrea, 49, have tried to prepare their 7-year-old triplets (two girls and a boy) to face such ridicule, but “it’s been a non-issue.” Her kids know “their family is not like everybody else’s” but “think it is much more unusual that they are triplets than that they have gay moms.”

It makes me excited to become a lesbian mom someday soon!