How do donor-conceived adults with lesbian parents think about parenting their own kids? And what do the lesbian parents think about becoming grandparents? Recent results from the longest-running study of lesbian families shed light on these questions.
The NLLFS
The National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS) has focused on the same group of subjects since 1986, when the researchers began interviewing the inseminating or pregnant parents. (They looked solely at DI families in order to limit the number of variables.) They have interviewed them again in seven waves, several years apart, and also directly questioned the children starting at 10 years of age. Now the offspring are in their early 30s.
A recent paper from the NLLFS, “Adults Conceived via Donor Insemination by Lesbian Parents Reflect on Their Own Future Parenting Plans (and Their Own Parents Reflect on Being Grandparents),” looks at the DI offsprings’ own parenting plans and at their lesbian parents’ views of grandparenthood. “There has been no prior research specifically on the parenting plans of adult donor-conceived offspring who have or are planning to have children, nor on the grandparent aspirations of their sexual minority parents,” the authors say.
Of the 75 offspring in the study, eight had children and 42 said they hoped to have them someday. Sexual orientation and relationship status of the offspring were not significant factors in whether they had or wanted to have children, the study found.
The Offspring and Their Parenting
The researchers asked the offspring about the parenting challenges they had or might expect. The respondents generally did not feel their family background would be a challenge in their own parenting. A few noted potential challenges from negative societal reactions to their family background; and some thought that not being familiar with the role of a father in their family might also be challenging. Nevertheless, the authors point out that other research has indicated the offspring of lesbian parents “may have developed resiliency in the face of stigmatization due to their parents’ sexual orientation,” and their parents “may have shown them how to navigate difficulties in a heteronormative context.”
The offspring were also asked about what they saw or anticipated the best part of parenting to be, given their family background. The researchers summarized that:
Offspring were excited to love and accept their future children with open-mindedness to the children’s uniqueness, including their gender and sexual identity. They were proud of their own parents as supportive and accepting role models and hoped to follow in their footsteps. The offspring had been reared in nontraditional families, and exposed to the SGM [sexual and gender minorities] community, and knew that they could teach their children to welcome diversity in families….
The researchers also looked at what the offspring planned to tell their own children about their (the offspring’s) minority status as someone conceived via DI by lesbian parents. The majority planned to mention their own DI conception to their own children early on, “in a casual, honest, and straightforward way.” Those who had already done so found that the children viewed this as normal. The authors summarize:
Prospective parents who are planning to use donor insemination should take heart from the comments by offspring in this study, who mostly see few challenges and many benefits in telling their own children about nontraditional conception and diverse families.
Lesbian Grandparents
Finally, the researchers asked the eight NLLFS lesbian mothers who were grandparents about their role as grandparents and the most challenging and best experiences. “Most of the grandparents viewed their role as very important and essential,” they found. While a couple of the participants expressed challenges with in-laws, none saw their nontraditional background as being a significant factor. One actually noted this background was a strength, saying:
I believe that being a lesbian parent has given me the courage to trust my children, my grandchildren and the job I did as a parent. Coming from being nontraditional I have the flexibility to support my children and grandchildren in their choices.
The researchers speculate “that the experience of grandparenthood represented a key transaction in the lives of NLLFS parents that dissipated potential concerns they might have had when conceiving their own children in a heteronormative and stigmatizing context in the 1980s.”
In other words, the kids—and their kids—are all right.
Resources and More
Full citation: “Adults Conceived via Donor Insemination by Lesbian Parents Reflect on Their Own Future Parenting Plans (and Their Own Parents Reflect on Being Grandparents),” Esther D. Rothblum, Henny M. W. Bos, Nicola Carone, Audrey S. Koh, and Nanette K. Gartrell, LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal (2023).
NLLFS Principal Researcher Nanette Gartrell is a Visiting Distinguished Scholar at UCLA’s Williams Institute, which I thank for alerting me to this paper.
Want more on the NLLFS? I’ve had the pleasure of interviewing Gartrell twice, once in 2008 when the offspring were teens, and once in 2018 when they were 25. I’ve also written many more posts about previous NLLFS findings. One of my favorites is about a 2019 paper on what the NLLFS parents said were the best and most challenging parts of 25 years of parenthood.
Want more on talking with kids about donor conception?
- For young children: The picture books from my Database of LGBTQ Family Books tagged “Sperm donor” and “Assisted reproduction.”
- For middle-grade readers: Roads to Family: All the Ways We Come to Be, but please read my review at the link for one major error and a few shortcomings.
- For older youth and adults: COLAGE’s “Donor Conceived: A Guide for People Who Have LGBTQ+ Parents and Were Born via Donor Conception and/or Surrogacy.”
- For adults: LGBTQ Family Building, Your Future Family, and Building Your Family each offer useful advice on talking with kids about donor conception, but again, see my reviews for some errors and shortcomings.