“A long-term study of children
raised by lesbians found that these children were less likely
to suffer from physical and sexual abuse than were their peers
who were raised by heterosexuals. This is thought to be due to
the absence of adult heterosexual men in the households (Gartrell,
Bos, & Goldberg, 2010). Girls raised by
lesbians tend to have higher self-esteem, show more maturity
and tolerance than their peers, and are older when they have
their first heterosexual contact (Gartrell et al., 2005, 2010). Children
raised by same-sex parents seem to be less constrained by
traditional gender roles; boys are less aggressive, and girls are
more inclined to consider nontraditional careers, such as doctor,
lawyer, or engineer (Gartrell et al., 2005; Stacey & Biblarz,
2001). Over the course of more than 20 years, scientists studied
the psychological adjustment of 78 teenagers who were raised by lesbian mothers. Compared to age-matched counterparts raised
by heterosexual parents, these adolescents were rated higher
in social, academic, and total competence, and lower in social
problems, rule-breaking, aggression, and externalizing problem
behavior (Gartrell & Bos, 2010).
There are fewer studies of children raised by two men, but gay
fathers are more likely than straight fathers to put their children
before their career, to make big changes in their lives to accommodate
a child, and to strengthen bonds with their extended families
after becoming fathers (Bergman, Rubio, Green, & Padrone,
2010).”
~ Martha Rosenthal, Human Sexuality: From Cells to Society, p.247.“having gay parents will harm children”
I love that this is cited and sourced ahhhh. Actual researched support! So good.
I hate to throw a wrench in this but…class is a huge part of it. And respectability politics.
There’s no doubt the impacts are here, but only a segment of same sex couples are even able to have kids!
Its costly and there are significant barriers for same sex couples to get kids (whether adoption or IVF) via policy and extra scrutiny.You didn’t throw a huge wrench into it because:
“… his research, which used U.S. Census data and not convenient samples, looked at thousands of kids raised by same-sex parents and found no difference in grade retention (when a kid gets held back in school) after accounting for demographics, such as income.”
(https://www.google.ca/amp/s/amp.livescience.com/6073-children-raised-lesbians-fine-studies-show.html)While your concerns and points brought up are real, any study worth its salt accounts for those things. Though you can’t account for everything your concerns aren’t as relevant when you consider:
-They compared the kids raised by queer couples to kids raised by heterosexual parents of the same socioeconomic standing.
-Not all queer couples adopt. Reminder that sometimes a lesbian relationship has enough genital variance to make a baby. It is also important to consider that queer people can have kids from previous relationships, or take in siblings or grandchildren from within their own family. In fact an analysis of the 2008/2010 GSS stated that up to 37% of LGB people have had a child. (With 38% of transgender people having one.)Your concerns are real, but in this case not relevant. The study and quote specifically discusses whether queer people have the capacity to be parents, so they compared their children to their heterosexually raised counterparts. There is a discussion to be had around whether the process it takes for queer people to adopt is fair, but this study and quote is agreeing with you.
We need studies like this to display into the capitalist world we live in because right now people don’t believe people they believe numbers. And the only way to fix the problems that you brought up is to have these (granted imperfect but what study isn’t) studies. To have irrefutable proof, that queer people are good enough to be parents, because while in a perfect world we wouldn’t need to prove ourselves, we don’t live in a perfect world. So when faced with an imperfect society, sometimes we have to come back with imperfect solutions.
Thank u for adding corrections and added analysis !
Pls look at these addendums !!!
Tag: the more you know
So let me get this straight, in Monopoly if you give one player more money to start out it’s “unfair” but if you do it in real life it’s “capitalism”?
You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.
In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly.
Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…
Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.
WOW.. THIS IS CRUCIAL!
Thank you for that!!! 👏👏
Nothing but My Aching Soul 