The results from another study looking at the well-being of children with same-sex parents are in and the findings reveal yet again that these children are, in many ways, better off than those kids from traditional families.
A small Australian study found that children raised by same-sex couples scored higher than children with heterosexual parents in nearly all measures of physical, mental and social well-being. These kids are generally happy, healthy, well-adjusted and living in harmonious households. The research revealed that one big challenge for these kids seems to be dealing with the stigma associated with having same-sex parents. Stigma can have a negative impact on a child’s mental health.
For the study, researchers from the University of Melbourne focused on the survey results from 315 same-sex parents representing 500 kids, ages 0 to 17. About 80 percent of the children had female parents, and 18 percent male.
While this sample size is small, the researchers pointed out that past studies have been even smaller and the most widely recognized study looked at children of lesbian parents.
These smaller studies have proved that children with same-sex parents score well in psychosocial aspects of their health, yet researchers have yet to hone in on how kids are affected by the stigma that’s attached to having same-sex parents. The team of researchers led by Dr. Simon Crouch set out to more precisely describe the physical, mental and social well-being of kids with same-sex parents and find out how stigma plays into this.
Dr. Crouch found that children with same-sex parents scored an average of 6 percent higher than the general population in nearly all areas of general behavior, general health and family cohesion. Children of both same-sex and traditional families scored similarly in other areas including measures of temperament, mood and self-esteem. The one area where children of same-sex parents weren’t better off than kids with heterosexual parents was mental health and issues with mental health were directly correlated with stigma. Dr. Crouch found that two thirds of the kids were negatively impacted by some sort of stigma; the greater the stigma, the more significant the negative impact.
In other words, the narrow-minded, intolerant thinking these families can face in their community and in the media is harmful to the children’s emotional well-being.