Young adults with lesbian parents are just as mentally healthy as their peers—and while that may feel like another “We could have told you that” headline, the data is coming from the National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the longest-running study on LGBTQ-parent families, so it’s worth paying attention.
The NLLFS focus on the same group of subjects over many years (what researchers call a “longitudinal” study) offers a picture of lesbian families few other studies can match. Principal Researcher Nanette Gartrell, M.D., a psychiatrist and Visiting Distinguished Scholar at the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, and her colleagues began interviewing the mothers in 1986, when they were inseminating or pregnant, then again when their children were a year and a half to two years old, five, 10, 17, and 25. They also directly questioned the children at 10, 17, and 25 years of age.
Their latest peer-reviewed paper, the first with results about the children at 25 years old, focuses on mental health because “the peak incidence of many psychiatric disorders occurs during emerging adulthood,” the authors explain. They matched the 77 adult offspring in the NLLFS with a population-based sample of 77 adults of comparable age, sex, race/ethnicity and education, and found “there were no significant differences in measures of mental health” between the two groups on a range of standard psychological measures, including the presence of behavioral or emotional problems, scores on mental health diagnostic scales, and percentages of scores in the borderline or clinical range.
I interviewed Gartrell in 2008, when NLLFS first published results about the then-17-year-old children of participant families. I’m very excited to have interviewed her again this week about the latest findings and the project over time. I couldn’t wait to pass on news about the new paper, though, especially as it relates to timely legal and political issues. As co-author Henny Bos, Ph.D., said in a press release, “These findings demonstrate that claims that it is harmful for children to be raised by same-sex couples are completely unfounded. There is no justification to restrict child custody or placement, or access to reproductive technologies, based on the parents’ sexual orientation.”
The NLLFS has also shown in previous papers:
- “The development of psychological well-being” in the children between ages 10 and 17 “is the same for those who were conceived through known and unknown donors.”
- The 17-year-old children in the study “were rated higher than their peers in social, academic, and overall competence, and lower in aggressive behavior, rule-breaking, and social problems, on standardized assessments of psychological adjustment.” (Though see my earlier piece on claiming—or not—that we’re “better” parents.)
- The quality of life—a measure of positive psychological adjustment—of 17-year-olds raised by lesbian moms did not differ from those who grew up with straight parents.
- Among the 17-year-olds in the study, none report having ever been physically or sexually abused by a parent or other caregiver. This contrasts with 26 percent of American adolescents who report parent or caregiver physical abuse and 8.3 percent who report sexual abuse.
- The lack of male role models “did not adversely affect the psychological adjustment” of teens in the study.
- Almost all of the teens in the NLLFS are academically successful and say they are happy with their lives, even in the face of discrimination and stigma (though I’ll note we should be careful with such findings so we don’t pressure our children to seek some unobtainable ideal or to hide problems when they do occur).
One thing to note is that the vast majority of families in the NLLFS are White and middle- or upper-middle class, and the children were all created through donor insemination. As Gartrell explained to me in 2008, the diversity of the group was limited by the difficulty in finding and recruiting any intentional lesbian families back in 1986. They focused on donor-insemination families in order to limit the number of variables, especially with limited resources. While the NLLFS results are legitimate and important, the authors of the current paper acknowledge there is much more to do, writing, “These findings need replication in a larger population that includes participants with more diversity with respect to race, ethnic background, education, income, gender identity, and sexual orientation, with parents in more diverse sexual minorities (i.e., lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender).”
Nevertheless, an overwhelming preponderance of evidence from dozens of other studies supports the NLLFS findings that children of lesbian parents (and gay parents, too) do just as well as their peers. (The number of studies on children of bisexual and transgender parents is smaller, but point in the same direction.)
NLLFS was one of the first research projects to turn a critical academic eye on LGBTQ families, and continues to provide valuable support for clinicians serving our families and for advocates, lawyers, and politicians committed to advancing equality.
“National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study—Mental Health of Adult Offspring,” appears in The New England Journal of Medicine and is co-authored by Nanette Gartrell, M.D., Visiting Distinguished Scholar, along with Henny Bos, Ph.D., Professor of Child Development and Education and Endowed Chair in Sexual and Gender Diversity in Families and Youth at the University of Amsterdam, and former Visiting International Scholar at the Williams Institute, and Audrey Koh, M.D., Associate Professor, Department of Obstetrics, Gynecology, and Reproductive Sciences, University of California, San Francisco.
