Are Children with Same Sex Parents at a Disadvantage?

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Same-sex advocates are quick to explain that many professional health organizations have explained that children in same-sex homes do just as well in important health measures as children in heterosexual homes.

Their statements neglect a vital point of comparison.  One must examine exactly what they have said, and what they have not said in order to understand what this actually means for child welfare.

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP), the leading medical organization to make such a statement, and which most other organizations followed, simply said,

“a growing body of scientific literature demonstrates that children who grow up with 1 or 2 gay and/or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do children whose parents are heterosexual.”

So curious people must ask, do the children with two gay or lesbian parents look like children with heterosexual intact, married parents? Do they look like children with hetero-divorced parents? Single parents? Hetero stepparents? Cohabiting parents?
 
Nowhere in the AAP’s research, nor in any of the studies they cited, are we told. If the AAP’s statement is going to tell us anything objectively useful, then the family structure of the heterosexual homes being compared is essential because the outcomes for each is dramatically different in nearly every important measure of child AND adult well-being.

This oversight deems the AAP statement utterly meaningless in providing any kind of decisive information on how helpful or harmful same-sex families could be to children. It essentially claims, “Kids from lesbian-parented homes look like children from some kinds of heterosexual-parented home.” It says nothing specific about the quality or health-outcomes of lesbian- or gay-headed homes because some forms of heterosexual-parented homes are healthy and some are not.

Same sex parenting advocates have made no attempt in any professional literature to clarify this by specifically saying what kind of hetero-homes the same-sex homes in the studies were compared to.