So many gay couples today have kids that it has become a cultural phenomenon – there's even a new TV show about a modern family that includes a gay couple with an adopted baby.
One in five male couples and one in three lesbian couples were raising children as of the 2000 Census. That's way up from 1990, when one in 20 male couples and one in five lesbian couples had kids.
But Census numbers are just part of a new comprehensive analysis of research on gay parenting since the 1970s in new book Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children: Research on the Family Life Cycle, by Abbie Goldberg, an assistant professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.
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Gay households have more in common than not with their heterosexual counterparts who are also raising kids, the research shows. "The sexual orientation of a parent has really little to do with their parenting," Goldberg says.
That idea comes through loud and clear in pop culture, in TV shows such as Modern Family, in which two gay men adopt a Vietnamese infant, and among celebrities as gay stars are increasingly having or adopting children.
Demographer Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles also has studied same-sex families. His new analysis of the 2008 American Community Survey showed that 31% of same-sex couples who identify themselves as spouses are raising kids compared with 43% of heterosexual couples. That survey marked the first available Census data about same-sex spouses and gay U.S. families. Gates says same-sex couples who identify as married are similar to heterosexual couples in many ways, including the fact that almost one-third are raising children.
Among findings outlined in Goldberg's book:
•The transition to parenthood is similar for both homosexual couples and heterosexual couples.
•Children of gay couples don't differ from their peers raised by heterosexual couples in terms of their mental health, self-esteem, life satisfaction, social skills or number of friends.
•Children in gay families are teased more about their families and their sexuality but are not teased more overall.
Stephanie Woolley-Larrea, 36, of Miami says she and her partner, Mary Larrea, 49, have tried to prepare their 7-year-old triplets (two girls and a boy) to face such ridicule, but "it's been a non-issue."
Her kids know "their family is not like everybody else's" but "think it is much more unusual that they are triplets than that they have gay moms."
Goldberg's analysis also included phone interviews that began in 2005 with adoptive parents in 30 states, including 30 to 35 male couples, 40 lesbian couples and 50 to 60 heterosexual couples. They were interviewed before adoption and three months after, with two annual follow-ups so far.
"Gay men are just as likely to want to parent as straight men, but are less likely to parent because of all the barriers in their way," Goldberg says.
Her analysis also suggests that children of gay parents are no more likely to identify as gay themselves.
Sociologist Tim Biblarz of the University of Southern California-Los Angeles says too little long-term, large-scale research exists to conclude that being raised by same-sex couples doesn't affect sexual identity.
"That's an area that the next decade of research might really be able to pioneer."
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