matt_mcl, the quoted portion of your cite says that there is very limited data when it comes to having two gay fathers, so I wouldn’t agree that this is “a very thoroughly plowed field.”
As for two gay mothers, I’m not sure how one would reconcile that with the general psychological wisdom that children who grow up without a father figure tend to have developmental problems. For that matter, while the study does talk about “the vast majority of studies,” that’s not quite the same as saying that this field has been comprehensively covered either.
In fact, given the relative paucity of gay adoption, I don’t think we can draw any sensible conclusions regarding the stability or development of children who are adopted into gay families. Some would say, “Then we need to try it, so that we can show that there is no difference!” That makes me uncomfortable though, precisely because one should not start by assuming a position to be true, and then starting out to to prove it. I’m also uncomfortable with the notion of a social engineering experiment involving children – and yes, I can already hear the taunts of, “Oh, boo hoo! Won’t you think of the children? Boo hoo!”
It seems to me that putting children into the state run system (either as wards of the state or as foster kids) is also experimenting on children (if we’re going to use that terminology).
No, because that’s a situation where there is no choice… where the children need to go somewhere, and there are no parents or orphanages that can take them. What’s more, it’s already pretty well established that children who are raised as wards of the state don’t have the stability of an actual family environment, so even if we grant that it’s an “experiment” in social engineering, the results don’t demonstrate that it’s just as good as full parenting.
Remember, I was responding to the question of what it would take “to abandon the idea, i.e. how many healthy children raised by gay couples and how many screwed-up children raised by straight couples would we need to demonstrate that gay or straight parents isn’t by itself a critical factor.” This question assumes that there is no substantive difference. Speaking strictly in terms of the available data, I don’t think we have enough reason to conclude that no such difference can exist.
And some gay adoptions fall under the heading of there’s nowhere else to go. So, in that case, a gay adoption wouldn’t be experimenting either.
I guess we’ll have to disagree. The cited studies seem reasonable enough evidence to me that there is no meaningful substantive difference. There are probably minor differences, but that would be true of any category of parents we decided to perform an analysis on.
Yeah, “the plural of anecdote is not data.” But I wish Seven were still active here. He was the son of a gay man, raised by him and his partner, whom he considered his dads, seemed quite well raised, looking to marry (heterosexually) in the near future when he was active.
Homebrew and his partner, and his Lesbian ex-wife and her partner, together are raising their son, who has four parents and was reportedly quite happy about the situation.
There are dozens, probably hundreds or thousands, of such examples – I picked two involving Dopers I’ve known from the boards to illustrate them, simply because gay marriage and gay adoptions have come to be a major topic of discussion.
Insofar as data can be accumulated, no, there is no problem. A child of a gay couple for 12 years is, on average, no different from a child of a straight couple for 12 years – same for 7, 16, or whatever. That’s what is meant by relevant studies.
One more thing. Here’s an interesting American Bar Association article of the history of sexual orientation in custody decisions in the US. Starting in the late sixties, states began to stop using homosexuality as an automatic disqualification for awarding custody. The relevant case in California happened in 1967 (see Nadler v. Superior Court, 225 Cal. App. 2d 523 (Cal. App. 1967)). That means that the idea that orientation is not a determinative factor in custody decisions is at least 30 years old in California. Had there been some significant disadvantage for children raised by homosexuals, I would think some evidence would start showing up by now.
You reconcile it by dismissing the conventional wisdom in this instance, since it’s apparently not true. That’s how it usually works.
At any rate, if there’s a study this side of NARTH that says that children of gays and lesbians are harmed by this, I’ve yet to come across it.
Even if you don’t accept the above studies as definitive (and what could you or anyone accept as definitive, I have to wonder), surely you must see that they make a prima facie case that same-sex parenting is no different from opposite-sex, and that it would take a pretty big-time study demonstrating the opposite to refute it.
I want to emphasize, by the way, that parenting by gays and lesbians is hardly an “experiment.” We have been parenting for quite some time regardless of the legal structures in place (often by raising one partner’s biological children, or else by single-parent adoption, as crummy as that is if the custodial parent should die or be incapacitated, which to my mind makes that legal inequality the real factor causing harm) and many jurisdictions have permitted adoption by two same-sex partners for some time now.
probably not, the bar mitzpa is the coming of adulthood to the child at 12/13 … and by that time he would have been working a full job as an adult as either aiding his own family business or apprenticed to another master. Same reason that I mandate he was married as he followed the laws of the time and marriage was a requirement to continue on in adult activities. Whether or not it was Mary Magdalene or not, I dont particularly give a crap, but he was acting according to the laws of the time. He learned his religious education as was required, and he maintained himself as a man, not an outcast.
We artificially extend childhood as the industrial revolution meant that we finally had the luxury of not having to work as soon as we were able to stand on a box and get to the workbench for families that had money If you were poor, you still worked. Actually, in my families mills when it was still legal to hire millhands as children you would see children as young as 6 running supplies, and as young as 9 working on thread spinners. At home, girls would take care of the younger siblings and have chores just like the adults. My mother was raised on a farm in Iowa, born in 1923. She took care of the chickens at the age of 5, and helped cook and clean, and in harvest when she was old enough to buck bales of hay, helped on the hay wagons with her brothers. She had her first full time paying job in a store at 14.
I’m not sure your logic fully holds through here. If your position is that any conclusion about the effectiveness of same-sex couple parenting is supposition either way, then equally there’s as much chance that it could prove superior to opposite-sex couple parenting. And by that logic, it’s just as possible that by not looking into this area, we are putting children’s welfare at stake.
IOW, either way there’s possible risk to children’s welfare. Not moving on with suc “social experiments” is as potentially risky as doing so.
I once read a book by a Catholic priest from India, who argued that cousins are always called “brother” and “sister” in Indian culture, and so those were obviously Jesus’s cousins seen from an Indian point of view. His thesis was that the Bible is about Eastern people, and Indians being Easterners can understand the Bible more accurately than Westerners.
But there are lots of studies about lesbian parents.
Is that general psychological wisdom at all? In any case, a child being raised by two women isn’t necessarily lacking a father figure (the biological father may be involved), is - just from my own personal experience - very unlikely indeed to not have a stable male role model in their life. If there are is a general acceptance that the lack of a father figure is bad for kids, that’s not necessarily a ‘problem’ that children of lesbian parents face.
Oh, I agree, it definitely shouldn’t be done as a social engineering experiment. It should be done because the number of kids needing to be adopted - especially older kids, kids with disabilties, sibling groups, etc, or kids from other countries -
is larger than the number of prospective parents - and because there’s no good evidence that gay parents are lesser than straight parents.
However, adoption is not the only method by which gay parents have children. In fact, out of the forty or so gay parents I know, only three adopted their child/ren. The rest were either from previous straight relationships or conceived through donor insemination. Therefore, there is quite a large pool of gay parent households to study.
A young man needs a male role model. As a young man who did’nt have one for a long time (my dad was on active service) I can say that it is definatly something that is needed. Girls I can’t talk about.
And BTW, to a poster above, young mens issues are a lot more complex than “erections and wet dreams”.
That was just an example I could think of. Girls, likewise, would need more than to talk about periods.
HOWEVER, are you saying that that would be a negative result of gay marriage? Or that simply, a child needs someone of his or her own gender in his or her life?
Even if you stop and think about it, one’s parents shouldn’t be a persons ONLY role models – male or female. As I said, I was glad to have an extended family of people I could talk to.
So was I. I can make no comment on the abilities of lack thereof of homosexuals as parents, this is something that one is skilled at or one is not.
For what its worth, I have a distant (by blood, we are actually pretty close) reletive who is a widow, and her only son is now 15. She likes it that when I hang out with him, because she wants male role models; I can’t say I am the ideal role model, but I can emphatise with the lad, the issues and challenges he is facing, because I faced them. Two lesbians can’t do that. Nor single women either.
The issue is logistics mainly; I am rarely around, fathers are always available, in theory at least and young men can learn by merely observing.
Along the “it takes a village” line, kids should have a large pool of role models, old and and young, male and female, gay and straight, of various ethnicities, etc. Parents or guardians of any makeup shouldn’t be the only role models for their kids.