The percentage of same-sex couples with children has fallen slightly since 2006—a drop that may in fact reflect a decline in social stigma, according to a new study. At the same time, the total number of same-sex couples raising children has risen, and the percentage of same-sex couples who have adopted children has nearly doubled in the past decade.
These families also represent greater geographic, racial/ethnic, and socioeconomic diversity than is often seen in the media.
The findings, by demographer Dr. Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at UCLA, appear in “Family formation and raising children among same-sex couples,” published in the Winter 2011 National Council of Family Relations Report.
Gates has analyzed data from several population-based surveys, including Census 2000, the 2008 General Social Survey, and the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey.
Data from Census 2000 showed that 17 percent of same-sex couples were raising children. That rose to 19 percent in 2006, but fell to 16 percent in 2009.
Gates said the decline may be because fewer lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) people are becoming parents at a young age while in opposite-sex relationships. Declining social stigma means LGB people are coming out earlier and are thus less likely to have children with previous opposite-sex partners (although a good per still do). Gates wrote, “These declines may be outpacing increases in adoptive parenting and parenting using reproductive technologies.”
But the decline in percentages hides an increase in the total number of same-sex couples raising children, however, from 63,000 couples in Census 2000 to 110,000 couples in Census 2010. This increase may be partly because more couples are reporting themselves in Census data, Gates said.
The percentage of same-sex couples with children who have adopted some or all of their children also nearly doubled between 2000 and 2009, rising from 10 percent to 19 percent.
And despite what Gates called “a common contemporary media image of gay parenting: wealthy, urban, and White gay men raising an adopted child,” 20 percent of children raised by same-sex couples live in poverty, versus 9.4 percent of children being raised by opposite-sex married couples.
Additionally, African-Americans in same-sex couples are 2.4 times more likely to be parents than Whites are, Latinos and Latinas 1.7 times more likely, and American Indians/Alaska Natives 1.5 times more likely, Gates has found.
The socioeconomic and racial demographics are not new news (Gates has written about it before), but bear repeating.
Also worth remembering, as Gates reminds us in his latest paper, is that same-sex parents live in every part of the country. The highest percentage of same-sex couples with children live in the South—not what one might expect.
Gates noted that “many same-sex couples raising children live in states with legal environments that at best are not supportive and at worst are openly hostile toward LGB individuals and their families.”
What to do about that? The “All Children Matter” report that came out last October (about which more here) has some good suggestions.
Gates also called on scholars and statistical agencies “to do a better job of collecting data about LGBT individuals and their families,” echoing an Institute of Medicine report from March 2011.