Sociologist Mark Regnerus’ study of gay and lesbian parents has been thoroughly discredited, but here’s a nice new piece of empirical evidence against it.
Michael J. Rosenfeld, a sociologist at Stanford University, has just published “Revisiting the Data from the New Family Structure Study: Taking Family Instability into Account,” and claims it is “the first empirical support for the argument by early critics … that Regnerus’s analysis was flawed by his failure to control for childhood family instability.” (Other research has looked at different errors in Regnerus’ work, such as his misclassification of respondents.)
Rosenfeld uses the same data that Regnerus used, from the New Family Structure Study (NFSS), but introduces “family transitions” (such as parental divorce or a change in child custody) as a control—a control that Regnerus did not use.
Rosenfeld shows, then, that having gay or lesbian parents and/or single mothers is “weakly or not at all associated with negative adult outcomes after childhood family transitions are taken into account.”
Where Regnerus erred, he says, was in not noting that many single mothers and gay and lesbian parents were formerly part of a different-sex breakup. It is that breakup, rather than the fact of having a queer and/or single parent, that has the negative impact on kids. Other academics have “Childhood family transitions are associated with negative children’s outcomes across every outcome type [such as lower educational achievement, higher unemployment, greater substance abuse, and greater mental health issues] into adulthood.”
But wait. What are we to make of Rosenfeld’s finding that “Adults who ever lived with same-sex couple parents experienced an average of 6.79 family transitions, while adults who never lived with same-sex couple parents experienced 1.84 childhood family transitions, a difference of almost five transitions between the two groups.” Are same-sex parents inherently more unstable?
No, says Rosenfeld. “The single largest contributor to the family transitions gap between children raised by same-sex couples and children not raised by same-sex couples is the difference in transitions resulting from a biological parent losing custody.” Add to that the fact that, not surprisingly (but disappointingly), “the chance of losing custody in any given year was less than one percent for mothers partnered with men (including the biological father of the child), and more than 11 percent for mothers partnered with women.” While the NFSS does not help explain why this is, Rosenfeld notes that “literature on family law documents a strong bias against gay and lesbian parents in judicial custody decisions in the past.”
Proving once again, of course, that equality benefits everyone, children included.
Sociologist Michael J. Rosenfeld’s own 2010 study is frequently cited as supporting the claim that children do no worse with same-sex parenting than in traditional families. But when you examine the details, you find something quite different.
Canadian economist Douglas Allen and two American economists reanalyzed the data used by Rosenfeld, and published their findings in the journal <i<Demography. They found that children raised by same-sex couples do worse in school than children raised by heterosexual couples, even cohabitating heterosexual couples, and much worse than children raised by married heterosexual parents: “Compared with traditional married households, we find that children being raised by same-sex couples are 35 % less likely to make normal progress through school; this difference is statistically significant at the 1 % level.” (from the abstract).
Here’s the Allen Paper:
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13524-012-0169-x/fulltext.html
It’s paywalled, but there’s a copy of the paper on Prof. Allen’s web site, here:
http://www.sfu.ca/~allen/RosenfeldCommentDemography.pdf
Allen et al reported that even “children who are being raised by a heterosexual cohabiting couple are about 15% more likely to be making normal progress in school than children being raised by same-sex couples,” and concluded that, “Together, these findings are strikingly different from those of the original study—and the differences are large enough to be noteworthy. With respect to normal school progress, children residing in same-sex households can be distinguished statistically from those in traditional married homes and in heterosexual cohabiting households. The magnitude of the differences is large enough to be relevant for current and future policy debates…”
Demography also published a defense by Rosenfeld of his conclusions, here:
http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs13524-012-0170-4
That one is paywalled, too, but the gist of Rosenfeld’s defense was that, “Allen et al. reached the conclusion that children in same-sex-couple families fare worse in school by including all children regardless of how long the child has lived with the family… and by including adopted and foster children along with the head of household’s own children…”
Do you see it? Rosenfeld didn’t dispute the poorer outcomes for children in homosexual households. Instead, he excused it. According to Rosenfeld, the lack of family stability in homosexual households was the cause for the poorer outcomes of their children.
So he treated family instability as independent of parents’ sexual orientation, and controlled for it, to “make the differences disappear.”
That’s exactly the same error that was made by Cheng & Powell, in their misplaced criticism of the the U.Texas / Regnerus study:
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2015/05/14978/
It is not statistically correct to “control for” other factors unless those factors are actually independent of the factor under test. That is not the case for these two studies. “Controlling for” factors like family instability, which are correlated with the sexual orientation of the couple, is an error which invalidates Rosenfeld’s and Cheng & Powell’s conclusions.
The ideal home for a child is one which is headed by that child’s own married, biological parents, in a healthy, stable, loving, heterosexual marriage. It is nonsensical to speculate that a home headed by the child’s own married, biological parents, in a healthy, stable, loving, homosexual marriage would be just as good, because there is no such thing.
Since Rosenfeld would not admit that family instability is a disproportionately common in nontraditional and disordered relationships, he had to find another excuse for the correlation. So he blamed the law, and in his concluding sentence he recommended legalizing same-sex marriage: “perhaps the logical public policy prescription would be to extend marriage rights to same-sex couples in the United States.”
The fact is that family instability (which is harmful to children) is very strongly correlated with, and presumably a consequence of, nontraditional or disordered sexual relationships. Even if that were the only negative consequence to children of having parents with same-sex relationships, it would be sufficient to support the conclusion that it is harmful to children to have parents who have same-sex sexual relationships.
I don’t agree with this analysis, but I leave it here in the spirit of presenting other views.