What scholars find and what scholars say don’t always match.
In six years of reading research on sexuality and family structure, I’ve found numerous examples of that truth. Another came to light recently with the release of a study of adoptive parents in the American Sociological Review.
The press release announcing the study said that it could undermine arguments against homosexual parenting and same-sex marriage. What it didn’t say was that its findings were based on "married male-female couples." The database used included no same-sex couples in its 161 "adoptive families."
How did a study that has precisely nothing to do with same-sex marriage come to be portrayed as supporting an argument for it? The answer is an object lesson on the uses and abuses of social science research.
Authors Laura Hamilton, Simon Cheng, and Brian Powell said it has often been asserted that children do best when raised by their biological parents. Who says this? Well, among others, the Washington State Supreme Court, which last summer rejected claims of a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, declaring, "Limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples . . . furthers the well-being of children by encouraging families where children are reared in homes headed by the children’s biological parents."
Since same-sex partners cannot, by definition, both be the biological parents of the same child, this belief that biology matters for parenting and childrearing is a major obstacle to full acceptance of same-sex marriage. In an apparent effort to attack this obstacle, the authors decided to compare families headed by two adoptive parents with those that include one or both of the child’s biological
parents.
They compared these families on one key characteristic - "parental investment" of resources in the child. The resources studied were economic (e.g., having a home computer), cultural (e.g., reading to the child), interactional (e.g., helping with homework), and "social capital resources" (e.g., attending a school event).
The researchers found that adoptive couples actually "invested" more in their children than biological parents. Part of that was because adoptive parents, on average, tended to be wealthier. But even when the findings were controlled for sociodemographic factors like income and education, the adoptive couples invested as much as families with two biological parents, and more than single parents and stepfamilies.
To know that this article did not study any same-sex couples, you would have to go beyond the press release, and even beyond the text of the article, to a footnote which explains that the number of same-sex adoptive couples "is still too small to support statistical analysis. Our analyses focus on married male-female couples who adopt."
Even though the study has nothing to do with homosexual parenting and same-sex marriage, let’s look at other aspects of it. It’s important to note that the variable being studied - "parental investment" - measures the behaviors of parents, not outcomes for children.
While it’s not illogical to assume some connection between parental investment and child well-being, there are undoubtedly many other factors which influence the outcomes in life for children. Indeed, it is somewhat suspicious that the authors chose to study only the variable of "parental investment." when a huge body of research has shown that children raised by their own, married mother and father are happier, healthier, and more prosperous than those in any other family structure.
In fact, the only data which the article provides on actual outcomes is found in another footnote dealing with children’s test scores. When the direct, raw data is compared, the reading, math, and general knowledge test scores of children with two adoptive parents were comparable to those of children living with both biological parents.
But when the researchers controlled for the level of "parental investment," and when they controlled for sociodemographic characteristics, they found that adopted children actually did more poorly.
Even if we were to assume that homosexual couples who adopt are similar to the heterosexual couples actually studied, it would not tell us much about general conditions for "children of homosexual parents." Most children being raised by self-identified homosexuals are not adopted at all - they are the biological children of those individuals who were conceived in a previous heterosexual relationship.
When a child’s biological parent - who is often divorced from the other biological parent - now lives with a gay partner, that situation resembles a stepparent household more than an adoptive one. And stepparent households fared poorly in the article’s findings.
The lack of a biological tie between parent and child is not the only reason to be concerned about same-sex parenting. Children can also suffer from the failure to provide both a male and female role model - a mom and a dad - within the home, and from exposure to the negative consequences of homosexual behavior itself, which is associated with higher rates of sexual promiscuity, sexually transmitted disease, mental illness, substance abuse, domestic violence, and child sexual abuse.
On the whole, the study does represent good news for adoptive parents and their children. However, this study’s findings cannot be applied to homosexual couples or the debate over same-sex marriage - no matter what its authors may have said.
