Over the past decade, several psych-based studies have come out stating that having gay parents leads to a lower quality of life. This notion was reaffirmed earlier this week when the governor of Tennessee signed a bill that would allow adoption agencies to reject couples because of their sexual orientation. With this issue coming into the headlines once again, it’s important to look at the psychological consequences of same-sex parenting and the scientific and statistical validity of the studies each side is using to support their argument.
People who argue that having same-sex parents negatively affects childhood outcomes often point to studies that retrospectively analyze the childhoods of kids with gay parents and compare it to that of kids with straight parents to look for any statistical differences. A commonly cited paper is by social psychologist Mark Regnerus. Regnerus found that kids of gay parents were much more likely to have been on welfare, feel less safe/secure in their family, suffer from depression, be arrested, have more sexual partners, smoke and use marijuana, and are less likely to be employed. Perhaps the most shocking point in his study is that “children of lesbian mothers are an astonishing 10 times more likely to have been touched sexually by a parent or other caregiver.” This is certainly a jarring statistic and led many people to question the validity behind Regnerus’ research. Recently, almost all of the points Regnerus made have been debunked because he did not control for confounding (unrelated) variables and thus falsely implied causality. One of the primary errors is that Regnerus allowed recently formed gay couples to participate in the study. This means that they were comparing kids who didn’t have steady parents and who were exposed to many different caregivers with kids who mostly had just 2 parents. This is much more likely to have caused adverse effects than the gender of the parents.
Not only have studies disproved the work of Regnerus and other similar studies, but it’s actually starting to point in the opposite trend. With more statistically sound evidence, studies are finding that kids of gay parents do better in school and are 6.7% more likely to graduate. There have also been studies that show that kids of same-sex parents score higher on health and family cohesion studies.
Despite headlines in the news arguing that same-sex parents are worse for child development, most studies are saying just the opposite.