[Donna]

The Data on Children in Same-Sex Households Get More Depressing
by Mark Regnerus

June 29th, 2016

A new study examines the risk of depression and other negative outcomes among adolescents and young adults raised by same-sex couples.

A new study released earlier this month in the journal Depression Research and Treatment contributes to mounting evidence against the “no differences” thesis about the children of same-sex households, mere months after media sources prematurely—and mistakenly—proclaimed the science settled.

One of the most compelling aspects of this new study is that it is longitudinal, evaluating the same people over a long period of time. Indeed, its data source—the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health—is one of the most impressive, thorough, and expensive survey research efforts still ongoing. This study is not the first to make use of the “Add Health” data to test the “no differences” thesis. But it’s the first to come to different conclusions, for several reasons. One of those is its longitudinal aspect. Some problems only emerge over time.

Professor Paul Sullins, the study’s author, found that during adolescence the children of same-sex parents reported marginally less depression than the children of opposite-sex parents. But by the time the survey was in its fourth wave—when the kids had become young adults between the ages of 24 and 32—their experiences had reversed. Indeed, dramatically so: over half of the young-adult children of same-sex parents report ongoing depression, a surge of 33 percentage points (from 18 to 51 percent of the total). Meanwhile, depression among the young-adult children of opposite-sex parents had declined from 22 percent of them down to just under 20 percent.

A few other findings are worth mentioning as well. Obesity surged among both groups, but the differences became significant over time, with 31 percent obesity among young-adult children of opposite-sex parents, well below the 72 percent of those from same-sex households. While fewer young-adult children of same-sex parents felt “distant from one or both parents” as young adults than they did as teens, the levels are still sky-high at 73 percent (down from 93 percent during adolescence). Feelings of distance among the young-adult children of opposite-sex parents actually increased, but they started at a lower level (from 36 percent in adolescence to 44 percent in young adulthood).

To be fair, life in mom-and-pop households is not simply harmonious by definition. It is, however, a recognition that it is not just stability that matters (though it most certainly does). It’s also about biology, love, sexual difference, and modeling.

Additionally, more kids of same-sex parents said “a parent or caregiver had “slapped, hit or kicked you,” said “things that hurt your feelings or made you feel you were not wanted or loved,” or “touched you in a sexual way, forced you to touch him or her in a sexual way, or forced you to have sex relations.” In fairness, this is a grouping of traumatic events that strikes me as unbalanced, what with the rather profound difference between hurt feelings and molestation. A follow-up inquiry revealed very few reports of the latter among Wave IV respondents.



This study is not above reproach. No study is. And I dare say Sullins’s recent evaluations of National Health Information Survey data provided a more robust evaluation of the “no differences” thesis than this one of the Add Health. A key limitation here is sample size. There are only twenty confident cases of respondents with same-sex parents in this large data collection project. This makes the same-sex household estimates displayed in the graph imprecise, but it does nothing to undermine the significance of the differences between groups. Part of the reason for the small sample has to do with the era in which the data collection first began. Same-sex households were very unusual, and the Add Health (as well as the New Family Structures Study) captures that. I have been quick to criticize use of such small-N studies in the past, and I’m not about to shift blindly into high praise here just because the results reinforce what I found in the NFSS. But the sample size issue is not the author’s fault. In fact, Sullins discerned that over half of the cases of same-sex households used in previous Add Health studies that declared “no differences” were households in which an opposite-sex parent was still involved, and elected to drop them from his analyses. It mattered.

Lingering questions remain. Why the surge in depression after becoming adults? This is especially curious given that the “distance” from their parents diminished since adolescence. Why such high rates of obesity? (It’s certainly not the media-tailored image of the same-sex parenting movement.) The author himself holds that any such answers would be “necessarily speculative.” Why is it published in an open-source medical journal rather than a social science journal? I don’t presume to know the process, but I would hazard a guess that rather than endure the increasingly politicized nature of peer review in the social sciences, the author prefers a less freighted avenue that allows scholars and public alike to examine the evidence rather than await the benighted imprimatur that a more prestigious pay-walled journal can give (and has given) to far weaker studies. If science is supposed to be open, Sullins’s work is certainly that. I don’t blame him.

Sullins has emerged as a versatile analyst, applying the same questions to multiple datasets. I have met him, and can attest that his motivations are similar to mine: We have seen the data and we are convinced that they cannot sustain the “no differences” thesis except by torturing them. (That is, by hiding the basic story behind sets of control variables, or worse, concealing it within privately held data that no one else can scrutinize.) But that is exactly what a media-driven, scholar-fed political movement accomplished. Why did it have to happen this way?

For whatever reason—and I welcome intellectual assessments of the phenomenon—there is a nonpartisan American tendency to draw ethical conclusions from empirical data. What is matters a great deal here. But discerning what is among a small, politicized minority reaching for unique rights is fraught with challenges. Hence the battle over what the data have to say about same-sex households with children took on incredible urgency. If social scientists could document that the kids were all right, it would answer the ethical and legal question of what to do next. Hence the unbelievably politicized furor over research on this subject. Mind you, this is not how Europeans have elected to discern the matter of same-sex marriage and adoption—just us Americans. (A similar empirical contest is currently infusing debates about gun control.)

The social science on same-sex parenting will continue, but since the Obergefell decision “settled” the legal question about same-sex marriage, the skirmishes will be minor compared to the blood sport witnessed a few years ago. Empirical truth is no longer quite so threatening to the wishes of some adults. The vulnerability of children, on the other hand, has not abated.

Whether they get one of each or not, children deserve a mother and a father whose love for them—and for each other—is the source of their life and socialization. In his conclusion, Sullins concurs: “Well-intentioned concern for revealing negative information about a stigmatized minority does not justify leaving children without support in an environment that may be problematic or dangerous for their dignity and security.”

Mark Regnerus is associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a senior fellow at the Austin Institute for the Study of Family and Culture.

Source

Invisible Victims: Delayed Onset Depression among Adults with Same-Sex Parents, D. Paul Sullins

[Paradigm]

So...moving on from a single study from a conservative think-tank to a meta-analysis of 78 different scholarly studies by one of the top five most prestigious law schools, here's what we get:

What does the scholarly research say about the wellbeing of children with gay or lesbian parents?

Overview: We identified 78 scholarly studies that met our criteria for adding to knowledge about the wellbeing of children with gay or lesbian parents. Of those studies, 74 concluded that children of gay or lesbian parents fare no worse than other children. While many of the sample sizes were small, and some studies lacked a control group, researchers regard such studies as providing the best available knowledge about child adjustment, and do not view large, representative samples as essential. We identified four studies concluding that children of gay or lesbian parents face added disadvantages. Since all four took their samples from children who endured family break-ups, a cohort known to face added risks, these studies have been criticized by many scholars as unreliable assessments of the wellbeing of LGB-headed households. Taken together, this research forms an overwhelming scholarly consensus, based on over three decades of peer-reviewed research, that having a gay or lesbian parent does not harm children.

Evaluating Studies that Conclude Gay Parenting Raises Risks: With regard to the four outlier studies, all share the same flaw. At most a handful of the children who were studied were actually raised by same-sex parents; the rest came from families in which opposite-sex parents raised their children for a period of time, but in which, often, one or more parent(s) subsequently came out as gay or lesbian and left the family or had a same-sex relationship. The result was a family that endured added stress and often disruption or family breakup. Including such children among those labeled as having been “raised by same-sex parents” is so misleading as to be inaccurate, since these children were generally raised by opposite-sex families and only later, after a family disruption, did they live in households with one or more gay parent(s), and only rarely did two parents of the same sex, in a stable, long-term relationship, actually raise the children together. Authors of these outlier studies argue that, nevertheless, such configurations often represent families with gay or lesbian parents, and hence it is reasonable to count them as indicators of what happens when children live with one or more gay parent(s).

Evaluating Studies that Find No Differences Resulting from Having a Gay Parent: Some critics of the LGB parenting research object to the small, non-random sampling methods known as “convenience sampling” that researchers in the field often use to gather their data. Yet within the field, convenience sampling is not considered a methodological flaw, but simply a limitation to generalizability. Within sociology and especially psychology, small, qualitative and longitudinal studies are considered to have certain advantages over probability studies: Such data can allow investigators to notice and analyze subtleties and texture in child development over time that large, statistical studies often miss. It is important to note, moreover, that some of the research that finds no differences among children with same-sex parents does use large, representative data. A 2010 study by Stanford researcher Michael Rosenfeld used census data to examine the school advancement of 3,500 children with same-sex parents, finding no significant differences between households headed by same-sex and opposite-sex parents when controlling for family background. Another study drew on nationally representative, longitudinal data using a sampling pool of over 20,000 children, of which 158 lived in a same-sex parent household. Controlling for family disruptions, those children showed no significant differences from their peers in school outcomes.

[Donna]

New Study On Homosexual Parents Tops All Previous Research

In a historic study of children raised by homosexual parents, sociologist Mark Regnerus of the University of Texas at Austin has overturned the conventional academic wisdom that such children suffer no disadvantages when compared to children raised by their married mother and father. Just published in the journal Social Science Research,[1] the most careful, rigorous, and methodologically sound study ever conducted on this issue found numerous and significant differences between these groups--with the outcomes for children of homosexuals rated "suboptimal" (Regnerus' word) in almost every category.

The Debate Over Homosexual Parents

In the larger cultural, political, and legal debates over homosexuality, one significant smaller debate has been over homosexual parents. Do children who are raised by homosexual parents or caregivers suffer disadvantages in comparison to children raised in other family structures--particularly children raised by a married mother and father? This question is essential to political and ethical debates over adoption, foster care, and artificial reproductive technology, and it is highly relevant to the raging debate over same-sex "marriage." The argument that "children need a mom and a dad" is central to the defense of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

Here is how the debate over the optimal family structure for children and the impact of homosexual parents has usually gone:

Pro-family organizations (like Family Research Council) assert, "Social science research shows that children do best when raised by their own biological mother and father who are committed to one another in a life-long marriage." This statement is true, and rests on a large and robust collection of studies.
Pro-homosexual activists respond, "Ah, but most of those studies compared children raised by a married couple with those raised by divorced or single parents--not with homosexual parents." (This is also true--in large part because the homosexual population, and especially the population of homosexuals raising children, is so small that it is difficult to obtain a representative sample.)
The advocates of homosexual parenting then continue, "Research done specifically on children raised by homosexual parents shows that there are no differences (or no differences that suggest any disadvantage) between them and children raised by heterosexual parents."
Pro-family groups respond with a number of critiques of such studies on homosexual parents. For example, such studies usually have relied on samples that are small and not representative of the population, and they frequently have been conducted by openly homosexual researchers who have an ideological bias on the question being studied. In addition, these studies also usually make comparisons with children raised by divorced or single parents--rather than with children raised by their married, biological mother and father.
In fact, an important article published in tandem with the Regnerus study (by Loren Marks, Louisiana State University) analyzes the 59 previous studies cited in a 2005 policy brief on homosexual parents by the American Psychological Association (APA).[2] Marks debunks the APA's claim that "[n]ot a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents." Marks also points out that only four of the 59 studies cited by the APA even met the APA's own standards by "provid[ing] evidence of statistical power." As Marks so carefully documents, "[N]ot one of the 59 studies referenced in the 2005 APA Brief compares a large, random, representative sample of lesbian or gay parents and their children with a large, random, representative sample of married parents and their children."

To summarize, we have been left with large, scientifically strong studies showing children do best with their married mother and father--but which do not make comparisons with homosexual parents or couples; and studies which purportedly show that children of homosexuals do just as well as other children--but which are methodologically weak and thus scientifically inconclusive.

The New Family Structures Study--Restoring the "Gold Standard"

This logjam of dueling studies has been broken by the work that Regnerus has undertaken. Unlike the many large studies previously undertaken on family structure, Regnerus has included specific comparisons with children raised by homosexual parents. Unlike the previous studies on children of homosexual parents, he has put together a representative, population-based sample that is large enough to draw scientifically and statistically valid conclusions. For these reasons, his "New Family Structures Study" (NFSS) deserves to be considered the "gold standard" in this field.

Another improvement Regnerus has made is in his method of collecting data and measuring outcomes for children in various family structures. Some previous studies collected data while the subjects were still children living at home with their parent or parents--making it impossible to know what the effects of the home environment might be once they reach adulthood. Some such studies even relied, in some cases exclusively, on the self-report of the parent. This raised a serious question of "self-presentation bias"--the tendency of the parent to give answers that will make herself and her child look good.

Regnerus, on the other hand, has surveyed young adults, ages 18 to 39, and asked them about their experiences growing up (and their life circumstances in the present). While these reports are not entirely objective, they are likely to be more reliable than parental self-reports, and allow evaluation of long-term impacts.

The study collected information from its subjects on forty different outcomes. They fall into three groups:

Some are essentially yes-or-no questions: are you currently married, are you currently unemployed, have you thought recently about suicide?
Other questions asked respondents to place themselves on a scale--for example, of educational attainment, happiness or depression, and household income.
Finally, "event-count" outcomes involve reporting the frequency of certain experiences--e.g., smoking marijuana or being arrested--and the number of sex partners.
Nearly 15,000 people were "screened" for potential participation in the study; in the end almost 3,000, a representative sample, actually completed the survey questionnaire. Of these, 175 reported that their mother had a same-sex romantic relationship while they were growing up, and 73 said the same about their father. These are numbers just large enough to make some statistically robust conclusions in comparing different family structures.

What the Study Found

The study looked at 40 different outcomes, but reported data for children with "lesbian mothers" and those with "gay fathers" separately. Therefore, there actually were 80 outcome measures that could be said to compare children with "homosexual parents" to those from other family structures. When compared with outcomes for children raised by an "intact biological family" (with a married, biological mother and father), the children of homosexuals did worse (or, in the case of their own sexual orientation, were more likely to deviate from the societal norm) on 77 out of 80 outcome measures. (The only exceptions: children of "gay fathers" were more likely to vote; children of lesbians used alcohol less frequently; and children of "gay fathers" used alcohol at the same rate as those in intact biological families).

Of course, anyone who has had a college course in statistics knows that when a survey shows there are differences between two groups, it is important to test whether that finding is "statistically significant." This is because it is always possible, by chance, that a sample may not accurately reflect the overall population on a particular point. However, through statistical analysis researchers can calculate the likelihood of this, and when they have a high level of confidence that a difference identified in the survey represents an actual difference in the national population, we say that finding is "statistically significant." (This does not mean the other findings are unimportant--just that we cannot have as high a level of confidence in them.)

Regnerus has analyzed his findings, and their statistical significance, in two ways--first by a simple and direct comparison between what is reported by the children of homosexual parents and the children of "intact biological families" ("IBFs"), and second by "controlling" for a variety of other characteristics. "Controlling for income," for example, would mean showing that "IBF" children do not do better just because their married parents have higher incomes, but that they do better even when the incomes of their households and the households of homosexual parents are the same. Again, Regnerus has done these comparisons for "LMs" (children of "lesbian mothers") and "GFs" (children of gay fathers) separately.

There are eight outcome variables where differences between the children of homosexual parents and married parents were not only present, and favorable to the married parents, but where these findings were statistically significant for both children of lesbian mothers and "gay" fathers and both with and without controls. While all the findings in the study are important, these are the strongest possible ones--virtually irrefutable. Compared with children raised by their married biological parents (IBF), children of homosexual parents (LM and GF):

Are much more likely to have received welfare (IBF 17%; LM 69%; GF 57%)
Have lower educational attainment
Report less safety and security in their family of origin
Report more ongoing "negative impact" from their family of origin
Are more likely to suffer from depression
Have been arrested more often
If they are female, have had more sexual partners--both male and female
The high mathematical standard of "statistical significance" was more difficult to reach for the children of "gay fathers" in this study because there were fewer of them. The following, however, are some additional areas in which the children of lesbian mothers (who represented 71% of all the children with homosexual parents in this study) differed from the IBF children, in ways that were statistically significant in both a direct comparison and with controls. Children of lesbian mothers:

Are more likely to be currently cohabiting
Are almost 4 times more likely to be currently on public assistance
Are less likely to be currently employed full-time
Are more than 3 times more likely to be unemployed
Are nearly 4 times more likely to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual
Are 3 times as likely to have had an affair while married or cohabiting
Are an astonishing 10 times more likely to have been "touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver."
Are nearly 4 times as likely to have been "physically forced" to have sex against their will
Are more likely to have "attachment" problems related to the ability to depend on others
Use marijuana more frequently
Smoke more frequently
Watch TV for long periods more frequently
Have more often pled guilty to a non-minor offense
Differences in Sexuality

When comparing children of homosexuals with children of married biological parents, the differences in sexuality--experiences of sexual abuse, number of sexual partners, and homosexual feelings and experiences among the children themselves--were among the most striking. While not all of the findings mentioned below have the same level of "statistical significance" as those mentioned above, they remain important.

At one time, defenders of homosexual parents not only argued that their children do fine on psychological and developmental measures, but they also said that children of homosexuals "are no more likely to be gay" than children of heterosexuals. That claim will be impossible to maintain in light of this study. It found that children of homosexual fathers are nearly 3 times as likely, and children of lesbian mothers are nearly 4 times as likely, to identify as something other than entirely heterosexual. Children of lesbian mothers are 75% more likely, and children of homosexual fathers are 3 times more likely, to be currently in a same-sex romantic relationship.

The same holds true with the number of sexual partners. Both males and females who were raised by both lesbian mothers and homosexual fathers have more opposite-sex (heterosexual) partners than children of married biological parents (daughters of homosexual fathers had twice as many). But the differences in homosexual conduct are even greater. The daughters of lesbians have 4 times as many female (that is, same-sex) sexual partners than the daughters of married biological parents, and the daughters of homosexual fathers have 6 times as many. Meanwhile, the sons of both lesbian mothers and homosexual fathers have 7 times as many male (same-sex) sexual partners as sons of married biological parents.

The most shocking and troubling outcomes, however, are those related to sexual abuse. Children raised by a lesbian mother were 10 times more likely to have been "touched sexually by a parent or other adult caregiver" (23% reported this, vs. only 2% for children of married biological parents), while those raised by a homosexual father were 3 times more likely (reported by 6%). In his text, but not in his charts, Regnerus breaks out these figures for only female victims, and the ratios remain similar (3% IBF; 31% LM; 10% GF). As to the question of whether you have "ever been physically forced" to have sex against your will (not necessarily in childhood), affirmative answers came from 8% of children of married biological parents, 31% of children of lesbian mothers (nearly 4 times as many), and 25% of the children of homosexual fathers (3 times as many). Again, when Regnerus breaks these figures out for females (who are more likely to be victims of sexual abuse in general), such abuse was reported by 14% of IBFs, but 3 times as many of the LMs (46%) and GFs (52%).

These data require more detailed exploration and explanation. A number of researchers have pointed out that self-identified homosexual adults (both men and women) are more likely to report having been victims of child sexual abuse. However, Family Research Council and other pro-family organizations have been criticized for also pointing to evidence suggesting that homosexual men are more likely to commit acts of child sexual abuse than are heterosexual men. And experts in child sexual abuse in general say that men are most often the perpetrators, regardless of the sex of the victim. Therefore, the finding that children of lesbian mothers are significantly more likely to have been victims of sexual touching by "a parent or adult caregiver" than even the children of homosexual fathers is counter-intuitive.

However, it is important to note what we do not know about such experiences from the data that have been published. The fact that a child of a lesbian mother was touched by "a parent or adult caregiver" does not mean that the lesbian mother was herself the parent or caregiver who did the "touching." An alternative scenario mentioned by Regnerus, for example--hypothetical, but plausible--is one in which a child is molested by her biological father; her mother divorces her father; and the mother later enters into a lesbian relationship.

Limitations of the Study

While the Regnerus study is a vast improvement over virtually all the prior research in the field, it still leaves much to study and learn about homosexual parents and their effect on children. Author Mark Regnerus emphasizes the traditional caveat in social science, warning against leaping to conclusions regarding "causality." In other words, just because there are statistical correlations between having a homosexual parent and experiencing negative outcomes does not automatically prove that having a homosexual parent is what caused the negative outcomes--other factors could be at work.

This is true in a strict scientific sense--but because Regnerus carefully controlled for so many other factors in the social environment, the study gives a clear indication that it is this parental characteristic which best defines the household environment that produces these troubling outcomes. The large number of significant negative outcomes in this study gives legitimate reason for concern about the consequences of "homosexual parenting."

The definition of what it means to have a homosexual parent is also a loose one in this study--by necessity, in order to maximize the sample size of homosexual parents. Not all of those who reported that a parent was in a same-sex relationship even lived with that parent during the relationship; many who did, did not live with the partner as well. Only 23% of those with a lesbian mother, and only 2% of those with a homosexual father, had spent as long as three years living in a household with the homosexual parent and the parent's partner at the same time. Details like this involving the actual timeline of these children's lives can reportedly be found in Regnerus' dataset, which is to be made available to other researchers later this year.

Figures like these suggest a need for more research, to distinguish, for example, the effects of living with a homosexual parent from having a non-custodial one, or the effects of living with a homosexual single parent vs. a homosexual couple. But they also point out something of note for public policy debates on "gay families"--the stereotype put forward by pro-homosexual activists, of a same-sex couple jointly parenting a child from birth (following either adoption or the use of artificial reproductive technology), represents a scenario that is extraordinarily rare in real life. Most "homosexual parents" have their own biological children who were conceived in the context of a previous heterosexual relationship or marriage, which then ended before the person entered into homosexual relationships.

Conclusion

The articles by Marks and Regnerus have completely changed the playing field for debates about homosexual parents, "gay families," and same-sex "marriage." The myths that children of homosexual parents are "no different" from other children and suffer "no harm" from being raised by homosexual parents have been shattered forever.


[1] Mark Regnerus, "How different are the adult children of parents who have same-sex relationships? Findings from the New Family Structures Study," Social Science Research Vol 41, Issue 4 (July 2012), pp. 752-770; online at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9X12000610

[2] Loren Marks, "Same-sex parenting and children's outcomes: A closer examination of the American Psychological Association's brief on lesbian and gay parenting," Social Science Research Vol 41, Issue 4 (July 2012), pp. 735-751; online at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/ar ... 9X12000580

Source

Peter Sprigg Senior Fellow for Policy Studies

[Paradigm]

Ah, the infamous Family Research Council. Interesting that this time the study cited was actually included in the meta-analysis I cited earlier. Like the other three outliers, it shares the flaw of looking at children raised by opposite-sex parent households until one parent comes out as gay, thus disrupting the family structure and having similar results to other family breakups, as opposed to families in which a child was raised by same-sex parents from the beginning.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Donald, that isn't how science works. A single study does not invalidate the wealth of data and tens of studies conducted, nor is the study you quoted the finest example of science ever conducted in the history of mankind as your second article practically tries to make it out to be.

Studies on children raised by same-sex couples typically have, among others, two things in common: children may indeed be teased specifically for having gay parents, and such children are more tolerant of the concept of homosexuality.

[Albert]

It is common sense to assume that children of 'same-sex' parents will be raise dysfunctional. I'm surprised that the legislation of allowing homosexuals to marry, before any significant research had ever been conducted on childhood development with two parents that are gay.

Most of the studies that I have read come out of institutions and conducted by people who already have bias to favour the homosexual legalization of adaptation of children. And who fanatically believe it is the right thing to do in the name of human progress. So their studies have a lot of flaws themselves. It is rich to see same people will question and critique studies that dispute their claims as bias, yet same critique is not applied to their scientific procedure.

[Harmattan]

I'm surprised that the legislation of allowing homosexuals to marry, before any significant research had ever been conducted on childhood development with two parents that are gay.

Gay wedding has no relationship with gay parenting, those are two disjoint topics.

And as long as homosexual adoption is uncommon because of legal reasons, it is impossible to have reliable data about it. The only way will be to wait for twenty to forty years after it is legalized to offset early societal perception and gather enough sampling to also correct the household income (gay adopters have a higher income) and the fostered child's color (gay adopters cannot adopt children from certain countries).

The only thing we know for sure is that, today, a heterosexual parent turning gay and then bringing his kid to live in a gay couple produces disastrous effects. But it may change in the future and results are likely to be better about exclusively homosexual parenting (but not necessarily innocuous, but not necessarily worse than poor parents).


Another difficulty is that the vast majority of social scientists will never run studies that may produce politically incorrect results. This is the very sad state of social sciences and colleges today. The school has been turned into a temple.

[Pants-of-dog]

.....
The only thing we know for sure is that, today, a heterosexual parent turning gay and then bringing his kid to live in a gay couple produces disastrous effects. ...

No, we do not know that.

[Paradigm]

What the data seems to indicate is that such occurrences cause about as much damage as any other breakup of the family. No more "disastrous" than a typical divorce.

[Albert]

@Harmattan What is worse is that common sense has been foregone. We are preached by scientist and social engineers (what I call progressives), is that we can not trust ourselves anymore, that social scientific study has more validity then our own intuition. You are right to suggest that this is pesudo-religious way of thinking.

Yet these progressives challenge the traditions that are ancient, and ironically critical of religious doctrine that fosters them. All the while using the same rationale that these "regressive" religious use. Lol

This is frightful though, as foregoing common sense like religious fanatics they enitiated something blindly without studying the consequence. This is frightful as it shows how blind these people are. As they just put children into situation that they know not what outcome will be off.

[Paradigm]

The simple-minded preach their own prejudices and call it "common sense," naively assuming they have made some sort of argument.

[Donna]

Donald, that isn't how science works. A single study does not invalidate the wealth of data and tens of studies conducted...

Meta-analysis isn't perfect, though. Studies like the one Sullins did usually attempt address some of the gaps that are left open, rather than ignoring present data.

...nor is the study you quoted the finest example of science ever conducted in the history of mankind as your second article practically tries to make it out to be.

Obviously the Family Research Council has an anti-homosexualist agenda that they signal when they editorialize external data.

Studies on children raised by same-sex couples typically have, among others, two things in common: children may indeed be teased specifically for having gay parents, and such children are more tolerant of the concept of homosexuality.

I would say that both are likely correlated with higher instances of depression and mental illness or distress, though that much should be obvious on account of homophobic bullying alone. Once again we encounter the perennial problem of a visceral homophobia that is unlikely to ever disappear, despite positivistic attempts to "tolerate" homosexuality (and might actually be making the situation worse). A more effective way for society to deal with homosexuality would be to find a way to integrate homosexuals in a manner that isn't abstruse and does not omit sexual pessimism as a reference.

[Bulaba Khan Jones]

Certainly, children who are subjected to bullying because of their gay parents, or other social complications (further kinds of ostracizing, some parents instructing their children not to associate with those children, etc) are probably going to be at a heightened risk of depression, possibly develop social phobia to some degree, and so on. However, countless factors through a person's life lead to mental health problems, and there simply isn't evidence at present that points to homosexual parents inherently causing depression and mental health issues, aside from individual cases. In such cases it's still debatable what exactly caused mental health issues (since many factors are at work).

[Albert]

The simple-minded preach their own prejudices and call it "common sense," naively assuming they have made some sort of argument.

Having an understanding what will be an outcome of one's own actions, before committing the act. Is indeed a simpleminded commonsense approach to things. That is lacking in the camp of social progressives and self styled social engineers.

[Pants-of-dog]

@Albert,

You lost the argument as soon as you claimed that your own intuition is somehow better for understanding the material universe than the scientific method.

Intuition and common sense are useful devices for making decisions on a day to day basis, but these things are heavily influenced by our own biases. While meta-analyses and scientific studies also have some bias, they also went through a rigourous protocol designed to minimise bias.

I just noticed that Regnerus is the author of the first article and the author of the study in the second article.

The study in the OP is flawed:

From an academic perspective, there are a number of flaws in the design of Sullins's research. To his credit, he used a large sample of data compiled by the CDC to test his hypothesis, looking at kids who were living with same-sex parents at the time of various surveys taken between 1997 and 2013. But "what Sullins's paper does not show is that these children were actually raised by the same-sex couple," wrote Rosenfeld in an email.

Reading the paper, it's impossible to say whether the kids in question spent most of their lives with heterosexual parents who then got divorced, for example, or a single parent who had multiple partners over time. This family history matters: "We have decades of research showing that family instability and divorce takes a toll on children," Rosenfeld wrote. Because of this constraint, he said, the paper cannot speak to the way being raised by same-sex parents affects the well-being of children. In an email, Sullins disputed this criticism, pointing to other widely accepted studies on emotional well-being and family structure that rely on the same data.

But there are other objections. In an interview, Abbie Goldberg, a psychology professor at Clark University, pointed out that the situation of gay couples in America has changed a lot since 1997, when social acceptance of homosexuality was significantly lower; kids surveyed at that time were probably more likely to have had a gay parent who divorced his or her opposite-sex partner. Scholars must pay to be published in the journal which accepted Sullins's paper, the British Journal of Education, Society & Behavioural Science, which is run by a for-profit company and not affiliated with any academic society. And although the paper ostensibly went through an "open-access" peer-review process, as University of Maryland professor Philip Cohen pointed out in a blog post, that process is pretty thin.

"I don’t want to imply that three journals are illegitimate just because they are run for profit by low-status academics from developing countries," Cohen wrote about this and two other papers published by Sullins. "But looking at the evidence so far I think it’s fair to call these journals bogus." The company that publishes these journals is also listed on the leading index of "potential, possible, or probably predatory scholarly open-access publishers," a sign of those journals' lack of credibility. Sullins defended his choice of venue for publication in an email, pointing out that it's free and available for anyone to read, unlike other journals; he also said his paper was reviewed by four people, who prompted considerable revisions before publication.

In his paper, Sullins concludes that the biological connection between parents and their children is "necessary and sufficient" to explain why kids with straight parents are less likely to develop emotional issues than kids with gay parents. In an email, he suggested that this is connected to other research about family instability. "Every child who is the biological child of a same-sex parent also has an absentee parent somewhere," he wrote. "[A]s the child comes to understand where babies come from, it is inevitable that she will wonder about her own origins, and may experience rejection or stress at the relative absence of her other parent."

But as he himself acknowledges, this conclusion directly contradicts a large body of research on this topic, which suggests that there are no differences between kids raised in stable households by gay or straight parents. In an email, Sullins argued that this "entire body of small-sample research is mistaken and highly misleading," pointing to biased methodology. But a number of nationally representative, large-sample surveys have consistently found that kids from stable gay households fare the same as kids from stable heterosexual households.

There's a certain back-and-forth logic to all of this: A scholar points to methodological flaws in a study, the author shoots back a counterpoint citation, and on and on. This is the normal way that academic debates work. But Rosenfeld argued that this is anything but a normal academic debate. "I don't think you can characterize the research and debates on children raised by same-sex couples as 'a back and forth,' any more than the debate over global warming or the debate over whether smoking causes cancer," he said.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc ... ts/385604/

[Hong Wu]

^^

The argument that people should filter out divorce before conducting the study misses the point, since gay marriages (especially lesbian ones) have significantly higher divorce rates. To suggest otherwise is to say that the study is done to serve those in power (in this case, the parents) and not for the sake of those without power (here, the children). That kind of attitude is normal for the west these days though. People take whatever they're offered and much of the outrage is against people who still feel outrage as an emotion.

[Pants-of-dog]

I highly doubt that lesbian divorce rates are significantly higher.

[Albert]

@Pants-of-dog

My intuition tells me that giving up childern to same sex partners is wrong.

My common sense tells me that initiating this without knowing the full consequences of such act is not wise.

I have argued about this on pofo before and read about a lot of studies that conclude there were no negative effects on childer. Yet I was never satisfied with methodology of those studies.

For example I was reading one study that was done over several years and concluded there were no negative effects. Yet the research was solely conducted by questionnaire during interview. So I've read were conducted by therapist, but again there would be trouble with methodology or it would be inconclusive yet presented as evidence there were no negative effects.

[mikema63]

My intuition says that some people in this thread are hateful little people with so little love or happiness in their lives that they cannot understand people who actually have love.

Beyond the clear lack of understanding of how science operates displayed by some here there is obvious hatred that some here have for those amoung us who actually have found love.

Desperately cry about how my loving relationship is actually worse than whatever pitiful loveless life you have if it makes you feel better.

I'm sure kids are better off with your hateful little shriveled husks of a life than in the context of the loving relationship I and my partner have.

[Donna]

I'd say anyone whose perfect idea of love conforms to empirical expectations alone is viciously perverting the essence of love.