“Are environments provided by lesbian and gay parents as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychosocial growth?”

The American Psychological Association Charade

When it issued an official report on “lesbian and gay parenting” in 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) made the bold claim, based on fifty-nine published studies on homosexual parenting, that “not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” 

The only way the APA could claim such is by assuming that thousands of other studies that quantify handicaps accruing to children whose married mothers and fathers separate (or do not marry at all) do not apply in situations when parents are homosexual.

But another reason the trade association got it wrong, according to Loren Marks of Louisiana State University, is that the studies lacked scientific validity; they failed to meet the methodological and statistical standards that the discipline is supposed to uphold. 

According to his exhaustive review of the studies the APA cited, not a single study “compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of random married parents and their children.

The available data, which are drawn primarily from small convenience samples, are insufficient to support a strong generalization claim either way.”

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Read more: www.familyinamerica.org

Does it really make no difference

if your parents are straight or gay?

Walter R. Schumm

New data from a well-designed study suggest that it does, 

and it's not good news for the kids of same-sex couples

The claim that children raised by lesbian and gay parents thrive, on average, just as well as those raised by heterosexual parents has become a commonplace of opinion journalism, especially since the American Psychological Association reported that conclusion in 2005. However, two studies published online this week in the July issue of the peer-reviewed journal, Social Science Research, put a large question mark over that view of the subject.

In one article Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of Sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, reveals the results of large-scale, robust study showing poorer adult outcomes for children whose parents had same-sex relationships, compared with those raised by their own married mother and father.* 

The other article, by Loren Marks, an associate professor of Family, Child, and Consumer Sciences at Louisiana State University, reports on a review study that finds no firm basis for the APA’s view that gay parenting is equivalent to heterosexual parenting.

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Read more: www.mercatornet.com