Parejas homosexuales pueden ser buenos padres

Same-sex couples can be effective parents, researchers find
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By Sharon Jayson, USA TODAY
Children raised by same-sex couples appear to do as well as those raised by parents of both sexes, suggests an international research review that challenges 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.

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Sociologists Stacey and Timothy Biblarz of the University of Southern California, spent five years reviewing 81 studies of one- and two-parent families, including gay, lesbian and heterosexual couples. "No research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child well-being," they conclude.

"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," Biblarz says.

Three researchers critiqued the effort; their comments appear in the same issue of the journal. Lisa Strohschein of the University of Alberta in Canada takes issue with the review's attempts to "tease out the effects of the parent's gender" from an array of variables.

She notes that many of the studies cited place differences in family type "in context with other factors that influence child outcomes," including number and gender of parents in the household, sexual identity, marital status and biogenetic relationship to children. The review, she says, "provided no such context."

Kyle Pruett, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the Yale University Child Study Center and co-author of the 2009 book Partnership Parenting,has not seen the research review. But he says "you can't take gender out of the world."

He says that as adults, "we are struggling to be politically correct about gender" when we should be thinking more about the children. "It's not about the supremacy of one gender over another or about the necessity of one gender over another," he says.

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. We don't have data yet on two men parenting, but I think it will come out fairly similar," Stacey says.

Fatherhood expert Michael Lamb, a psychology professor at the University of Cambridge in Cambridge, England, says he has changed his views about gender roles based on more recent research.

"Nothing about a person's sex determines the capacity to be a good parent," he says in an e-mail. "It is well-established that children do not need parents of each gender to adjust healthily."

And what about single parents?

"What counts a lot more than the number of parents is the quality," Stacey says. "It's definitely an advantage if there are two parents who get along over one parent. But if the two don't get along, sometimes one parent is better."