New Research on Children Raised By Lesbians

The Dallas Morning News Religion blog (well worth reading, by the way) reports on new research from the Netherlands that refutes evidence that children raied by same sex couples are at some disadvantage:

A new paper in the American Journal of Orthopsychiatry reports on a study on parents in the Netherlands. Here's an only slightly jargony nugget:

With respect to child adjustment, the results of our large sample study confirm the findings of previous small sample studies. In general, our findings support the “no difference” consensus in empirical research on planned lesbian-parent families (Clarke, 2002; Stacey & Biblarz, 2001). That is, children in planned lesbian-parent families do not differ in well-being or child adjustment compared with their counterparts in heterosexual-parent families based on parental reports of the CBCL. These findings contradict what is maintained by opponents of lesbian-parent families, namely that children of lesbian parents run the risk of developing a variety of behavior problems because they were raised fatherless, lack a biological tie with one of the mothers, and are stigmatized by their peers (Blankenhorn, 1995; Cameron & Cameron, 1996a, 1996b; Wardle, 1997; Knight, 1997).


The authors do caution that the tolerant nature of Dutch culture might mean these results don't apply to other places. The authors are Henny Bos, Frank van Balen, and Dymphna van den Boom of the University of Amsterdam.



Read it here.

Comments

Lindy said…
The authors do caution that the tolerant nature of Dutch culture might mean these results don't apply to other places.

I think this is a significant caveat. The cultural milieu is more problematic than lesbians have ever been. And, believe me, I've known some problematic lesbians.
September 25, 2007 at 10:01 AM
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