WHEN Susan Golombok started her work on new family relationships in the 1970s, women who divorced men and moved into lesbian relationships routinely lost custody of their children. This was in spite of family law that heavily favoured mothers as sole guardians. The decisions rested on arguments about child welfare and worries about the development of children’s gender identity and sexual orientation. “The belief was so strong that living in a lesbian mother family would be damaging to children in all kinds of ways,” says Golombok.
Special: Modern families
Today’s families are more diverse than ever. We explore what this means for our relationships and our children
Conventional wisdom at the time held that children were best nurtured in families with two parents – one male, one female – who were both genetically related to the child. Yet 40 years on, in the US and UK, married, heterosexual couples with biologically related children now form a minority of families. The first longitudinal studies following the fates of children in non-traditional family structures, many carried out by Golombok and her colleagues at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for Family Research, are now being published. We can finally take an empirical look at what is important for a child’s development.
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The answers are clear-cut. The longest-running studies, following lesbian families, show that two female parents are just as likely to raise well-adjusted children as a heterosexual couple is. Although not as extensive, studies on gay father families come to the same conclusion. In the US, several large studies comparing lesbian, gay and heterosexual families , child behaviour, the emotional problems experienced by children or their psychosocial adjustment, including anxiety, depression and self-esteem.
Emotional equality
It’s a similar story with single-parent families. The Millennium Cohort Study in the UK has been following 18,000 children born at the turn of the millennium, including some in single-parent families. After accounting for factors like socio-economic status and the parent’s mental health, it has found no difference in the frequency of emotional problems in children across family types.
To eliminate the potentially disruptive effects of divorce, researchers are in the early stages of looking at single women who choose to have a child on their own with the help of a sperm donor. Golombok’s studies found that single-mother families seem to function as well as two-parent heterosexual families, and in fact children with single mothers had fewer emotional and behavioural problems.
Another study, by a team at Trinity College Dublin, Ireland, where there was no divorce or changing partners. They found that while children described a close emotional bond with their mother – open communication, shared activities and trust – the mothers described their parenting relationships as intense and exclusive.
“Children with single mothers had fewer emotional and behavioural problems”
This could mean that parenting styles are changing as a result of changing family structures. Some research on gay fathers suggests they may be on average less authoritarian, more warm and more responsive than heterosexual fathers. at the University of Massachussetts Amherst and Charlotte Patterson at the University of Virginia observed 104 adoptive families and assessed how the parents divided 20 tasks, from feeding to dressing and going to the playground. They found that gay and lesbian parents divided these more equally than heterosexual couples.
The latter also scored significantly higher when it came to undermining each other, anger and dissatisfaction with childcare arrangements (the last point was particularly egregious for mothers). Significantly, dissatisfaction with division of labour was correlated with maladjusted child behaviours.
As well as division of labour, the study also highlighted the importance of parent-child interactions. High quality interactions involve warmth and emotional support while still setting limits, says Laurence Steinberg, who studies child and adolescent psychological development at Temple University in Philadelphia. A large body of work shows that parents who are neither too permissive nor too coercive but offer a firm and encouraging presence foster self-reliant and confident children.
Divorce disruption
While there is no evidence that same-sex and single-parent families shouldn’t thrive, children caught up in divorce consistently show greater psychological, academic and interpersonal problems – a robust finding that has outlasted the social disapproval of divorce. Why, if family structure is not important?
It’s the cumulation of disruptions that’s the key, says Abbie Goldberg, a psychologist at Clark University in Massachussetts and author of several books on family relationships. “Divorce involves a couple of different pretty significant events. You typically go from one to two households, from an intact family to a separated or divorced family, and there’s often a loss of income.”
Relationships within a family aren’t the only determinants of a child’s well-being, however. In one study of 117 Australian gay and lesbian families, more than two-thirds of parents reported that their high-school-age children had felt isolated or different because of their parent’s sexual orientation. Nearly one in five had experienced discrimination by a teacher. Stigmatisation wasn’t universal; 41 per cent of parents reported no problems, and the children themselves said their classmates were more confused than mean-spirited. One child remembered remarks like: “How were you born, then?” and “One must be an aunt”. Some even said their peers were envious. “None of my friends have lesbian mums but they want them,” was one response.
If there are few differences in children’s emotional and behavioural functioning across families, says Goldberg, that doesn’t mean all families are made equal. “There’s a lot of complexity,” she says. “If you grow up with two moms, and you have a relationship with your donor dad, you’re having a different experience than a child down the street who was born to heterosexual parents and the child who has two dads and was born through surrogacy and doesn’t have contact with a birth parent. To say that doesn’t matter is silly.”
As to ideas that some couples or individuals have a greater “right” to be parents, “we’ve got to just take that off the table”, says Goldberg. “Every person deserves to be a parent as long as they can take care of a child.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “All you need is love?”
