Are Children with Same Sex Parents at a Disadvantage?

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No human culture anywhere, at any time, has ever raised a generation of children in same-sex homes. This is an experiment upon children to fulfill adult wishes to parent.

The family changes over the last four decades -- with its baggage of no-fault divorce, cohabitation, unwed childrearing and fatherlessness – have shown beyond doubt that these changes have been a wholesale negative for child well-being.

Consider the research on just one of these previous experiments.

Similar to the same-sex family experiment, we entered our national divorce experiment with all the best of hopes and intentions. Advocates pushing the divorce experiment called forth a few authorities who assured us that children are resilient and they would adjust to living apart from their parents. “Love would see them through” we were told, much like same-sex family advocates seek to assure us today.

Well, the millions of children who were subjected to this experiment tell us a different story, as witnessed by multiple studies:

• The American Academy of Pediatrics, the same organization that tells us the same-sex family will work out just fine, now tells us that divorce “is a long, searing experience…characterized by painful loses."
 (Committee on Psychosocial Aspects of Child and Family Health, “The Pediatrician’s Role in Helping Children and Families Deal with Separation and Divorce,” Pediatrics 94 (1994): 119)

• “Divorce is usually brutally painful to a child,” and 25 percent of adult children of divorce continue to have “serious social, emotional, and psychological problems.” Meanwhile, only 10 percent of adult children from intact families had such problems.
(E. Mavis Hetherington, For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2002), p. 7)

• “Children in post-divorce families do not, on the whole, look happier, healthier, or more well-adjusted even if one or both parents are happier. National studies show that children from divorced and remarried families are more aggressive toward their parents and teachers. They experience more depression, have more learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems with peers than children from intact families. Children from divorced and remarried families are two to three times more likely to be referred for psychological help at school than their peers from intact families. More of them end up in mental health clinics and hospital settings.”
(Judith Wallerstein et al., The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A
25 Year Landmark Study, (New York: Hyperion, 2000), xxiii)

Also, a convincing body of research shows us that children do not do as well when their mothers or fathers marry other people. And since it is biologically impossible for a child living in a same-sex home to be living with both natural parents, all same-sex homes are either literally step-families – formed after the end of a heterosexual relationship – or step-like, in that only one parent has a biological connection to the child.

• “Social scientists used to believe that, for positive child outcomes, stepfamilies were preferable to single-parent families. Today, we are not so sure. Stepfamilies typically have an economic advantage, but some recent studies indicate that the children of stepfamilies have as many behavioral and emotional problems as the children of single-parent families, and possibly more. …Stepfamily problems, in short, may be so intractable that the best strategy for dealing with them is to do everything possible to minimize their occurrence”20 (emphasis added).
(David Popenoe, “The Evolution of Marriage and the Problems of Stepfamilies,” in Alan Booth and Judy Dunn, eds., Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does Not? (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 5, 19.)

• Children from stepfamilies, where the biological father is missing, are 80 times more likely to have to repeat a grade and twice as likely to be expelled or suspended, compared to children living with both biological parents.
(Nicholas Zill, “Understanding Why Children in Stepfamilies Have More Learning and Behavior Problems Than Children in Nuclear Families,” in Alan Booth and Judy Dunn, eds., Stepfamilies: Who Benefits? Who Does Not? (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), p. 100.)