Hey Conservatives -- Gays Are Better Parents Than You

When I ask 29-year-old Kellen Kaiser if I can get her take on a few new studies demonstrating the benefits to gay parenting, she jokingly warns me that she’s biased.

That isn’t really surprising given the family that the L.A.-based actress and writer grew up in. Born after three lesbian friends decided to co-parent (and one ultimately became pregnant), Kaiser was also raised by her biological mother’s long-term partner, alongside a brother who was the product of a known gay sperm donor.

Though this model of parenting may be unfamiliar to the average American, (and the specifics of this particular family are, of course, not characteristic of the entire LGBT community), to Kaiser, the strengths are obvious. As she says, “I certainly feel like I gained from being exposed to so many different and wonderful adults in my life. I think gay parents are more intentional on the whole than the average straight parent. Parenting is less done on automatic. Gay families tend to reexamine and reform traditions to the particular needs of their families and children.”

She’s not alone in this assessment, and research is beginning to back her up.

Robert-Jay Green, the executive director of the Rockway Institute for LGBT Psychology & Public Policy has looked at the experiences of gay men who became fathers using gestational or “surrogate” mothers. In April, in a paper published in the Journal of GLBT Family Studies, he and his colleagues reported that gay dads were more likely than straight to put their children before their careers, make significant changes in their lives to accommodate a child, and to strengthen bonds with extended families after becoming parents. He tells me, “The conservative argument is that children raised by gay parents will suffer by virtue of the fact of the parent’s sexual orientation. But there is lots of anecdotal evidence that children raised by gay parents are doing just fine and the central orientation of the parents, in and of itself, has no negative impact on the children.” His upcoming work will focus on translating such anecdotes into research as he studies the psychological outcomes of children raised by heterosexual parents compared to children conceived through surrogacy and raised by gay male parents.

Though Green will be the first to look at this particular population, in June, the results of an almost two decade-long study of the children of lesbian moms came out in the journal Pediatrics (pdf). This reported that not only do such children do as well as the children of straight married parents, but in some key ways, they do even better. Indeed, after following the children of lesbian moms for their first 17 years, researchers Nanette Gartrell and Henny Bos determined that compared to other teens, these kids were more likely to succeed academically, and were less likely to have social problems, break rules or exhibit aggressive behavior.

And in a recent review article published in the Journal of Marriage and Family, sociologists Judith Stacey and Timothy Biblarz looked at the results of 81 studies of gay, lesbian and heterosexual-headed families.  They found that benefits usually associated with families made up of a mother and a father are just as apparent in families with two women parents. And while the pair acknowledged that there simply wasn’t enough research on gay male parents to definitively make the same claim, they emphasized that all evidence indicated that the results would be similar.

Such reports, not to mention positive reflections by the children of gay parents, are probably pretty mind-boggling to the type of person who is convinced that gay men are pedophiles, lesbians bitter man-haters, and that both will raise children who are not only scarred by endless school yard taunts, but who are also likely to grow up to be homosexuals themselves. (Note to those folks: both Kaiser and her brother identify as straight).