From the Ivory Tower to the Family Room

(Originally published in Bay Windows, August 23, 2007.)

“I just keep having this desire to do work that seems impossible,” says Dr. Abbie Goldberg of her research on LGBT and other understudied families. The assistant professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester is passionate about delving into these areas few other social scientists have tackled, however. She wants her work to be used not only by other academics, but also by a wider audience. “Politicians and the media, in the absence of any scientific research, are pretty free to make their own assumptions and conclusions about how things might be,” she explains. “A big goal for me has always been to counter that with actual data about people’s real-life experiences.”

She took on that task after noticing a lack of research on the transition to parenthood among lesbian and bi women parenting together. Her first attempt to remedy this focused on one of the central dichotomies for most female couples who inseminate, that of biological and nonbiological mothers. “Society places such importance on biological and kinship relationships,” says Goldberg. “I was interested in how the nonbiological mother negotiated her role within the family, and where couples were successful in carving out roles that were satisfactory for both partners.”

Most of the parents she studied were, in fact, satisfied. They felt equally acknowledged as mothers and divided household labor evenly. Even when biological mothers performed more childcare tasks, the partners did not necessarily feel they had unequal parental roles. The few couples who did feel this way were not necessarily unhappy, though, as long as those roles matched their pre-family expectations. When people were dissatisfied, it was most often because the partners went into parenthood with differing assumptions of what their respective roles would be—a cautionary note for those considering children.

The nonbiological mother’s lack of a socially or legally acknowledged status did affect a few couples’ satisfaction. It was sometimes harder for a nonbiological mother to take time off work, for example. A second-parent adoption, while not necessary for the nonbiological mother to feel like a parent, did give some “a sense of relief as well as an enhanced sense of security in their parental role.”

One finding, however, held true across the board. “The idea that these women don’t want men in their lives, a common stereotype, was not true,” asserts Gold-berg. “They don’t need or want fathers for their children in the traditional sense, but by and large, they really embraced a very diverse group of men in their children’s lives—their own fathers, their brothers, their friends, colleagues, neighbors, pediatricians. It wasn’t surprising to me, but I think it’s surprising to some peo-ple who think of the lesbian community as separatist.”

Her current study, for which she is still recruiting (see below), expands on this previous work. It will include couples, LGBT and not, who are adopting their first child. There is no biological basis here to explain potential differences in parental roles and satisfaction, but there are other factors, such as the type of adoption (public, private, domestic, international), the ages of the children and whether the children are the same race as either or both parents. “They’re violating ideas about family in more ways than lesbian couples who inseminate,” Goldberg says, “particularly gay men, because there is such a stigma against men parenting without women.”

Goldberg has also studied a group often overlooked in research and media coverage on LGBT families—adults who grew up with at least one lesbian, gay or bi parent. She wanted to discover what insights they had that they might not have had—or been willing to share—as children. In particular, she wanted to learn how they come out about their parents, an experience often ignored despite the many writings on coming out as LGBT. Goldberg found a range of responses, as one might expect. Some told everybody, but others were more selective, often because of negative incidents when children.

She looked, too, at other ways having gay, lesbian or bi parents shaped their selves. They tended to be more open minded and accepting than their peers, for example. They were also very protective of their parents, even at the cost of their own identities. Some of those who thought they might be LGBT themselves delayed their own coming out because they didn’t want people to conclude that “gay parents ‘turn’ their kids gay.” These findings will not surprise those who have read Families Like Mine, Abigail Garner’s seminal book on adult children of LGBT parents. Goldberg here provides a quantitative complement to Garner’s qualitative profiles. Together they paint a valuable picture of LGBT families from a little-seen perspective.

Goldberg’s findings can shed light on our own family experiences, in addition to helping others better understand our lives. Goldberg realizes this many-sided nature of her work, and also knows she has only begun to explore the many aspects of LGBT families. She hopes her research will inspire other scientists to do the same. She also wants LGBT families themselves to use these studies, and is considering a number of options for making her results more widely available. In the meantime, you can find out more about her and her research at: www.clarku.edu/faculty/goldberg/.

LGBT and non-LGBT couples adopting their first child are invited to participate in the Transition to Adoptive Parenthood Project. For more information, contact Dr. Goldberg at (508) 793-7289 or agoldberg@clarku.edu.