Guest Post: Does New Research Prove Kids Do Better with Two Moms?

Today’s post comes courtesy of Glenn Stanton, Focus on the Family’s director of Family Formation Studies.

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A new study from the University of Melbourne in Australia on how kids from same-sex homes fare is getting a good deal of press. Perhaps you’ve seen the news stories and wondered if this changes the nature of the debate over the importance of the family?

It does not.

This new study gives the same kind of findings we’ve seen before, coming from the same kinds of studies with the same kinds of serious short-comings and method problems. You can read about the weaknesses of those previous studies here, here and here.

But this study tells us nothing about how kids in same-sex homes fare compared to children being raised by their married mother and father. It doesn’t even address the issue. I explain this and the other major problems with this study here in four major points.

1) The authors of the study plainly admit its significant methodology problems, which are the same problems with every other such study with similar findings…

1. It uses a very small (500 children) non-representative sample.
2. It is a convenience sample, meaning they used the most convenient sample collection available, by advertising in gay communities/publications/etc. and interested people signed up for it.
3. The parents participating in the study knew they were signing up for and participating in a study on the well-being of same-sex families.
4. The information was collected via self-reports from the parent on the well-being of their child.

The authors fail to appreciate that these same-sex parents -knowing they were participating in a study on same-sex families that would have very important political and social implications – have strong reason to be more positive in their self-reporting in significant ways on their child’s health relative to the comparison sample of heterosexual parents whose data came from general, non-partisan public health surveys. This is not a small point.

2) This study compared kids from two-mom and two-dad homes (only 18% were from dad/dad homes) with kids from heterosexual homes.

There is no explanation whatsoever of which kinds of homes these comparison group kids were from, which again is a problem with nearly every such study. Are they all married mother/father families? They were not. But how many were? How many were from cohabiting, single, divorced, remarried step homes? The authors do not say and never address this question as important which is an incredible oversight.

3) The study contains drastic and important differences in their heterosexual and same-sex parenting samples, which fall in favor of more positive same-sex family outcomes.

1. The same-sex parented kids population sample is a selective, non-representative sample of only 500 children.
2. The comparison population of kids from hetero-homes came from two studies with randomly selected samples of 5,335 and 5,025 children each.
3. The same-sex population sample had parents with dramatically higher incomes and education status than the general population.
4. The study does not specify age at first parenthood, but if similar to other such studies, the same-sex parents generally have their first child in their early- to mid-thirties.

Each of these factors mean that the measurements for the kids from same-sex homes have characteristics that strongly favor more positive well-being outcomes compared to the heterosexual-family comparison sample, i.e. more selective, smaller sampling, dramatically higher household income and parental education status, as well as later age, maturity and life-stability at age of receiving their first child. These are far from anything close to equal measurements and comparisons.

4) Finally, the study curiously contends that children do better in same-sex homes but they are also more likely to suffer serious harm from social stigma regarding their family.

While they don’t make this connection, nor do any of the mainstream journalists reporting on the study, it would appear that if this debilitating stigma were erased, these kids would be the new super kids, doing far better than all other kids, right?

So which is it? Are same-sex homes triumphant or victims? It’s hard to sustain being both.

The bottom line: nature’s purpose and design in ideally giving every child her own mother and father as her parents has not been challenged by any serious studies to date, including this one. And it is unlikely any serious study ever will.

Glenn T. Stanton is the director for Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family in Colorado Springs and a research fellow at the Institute of Marriage and Family in Ottawa. He debates and lectures extensively on the issues of gender, sexuality, marriage and parenting at universities and churches around the country.

Topics: Current Events Tags: family, homosexuality, kids, news, parenting July 9, 2014 by Jim Daly with Paul Batura