re rated by parents and teachers to be better adjusted and to have fewer behavioral problems. These findings are consistent with general knowledge among students of child development, namely that greater stability and nurturance within a family system predicts greater security and fewer behavioral problems among children.
Recent publications from 2 population-based samples lend additional strength to earlier evidence demonstrating that children's well-being is not threatened as a result of growing up with lesbian parents.46,47 The importance of these studies is that the research was planned and conducted by people who had no particular interest or investment in research regarding same-gender parents. In both cases the investigations regarding lesbian parents and their children were posthoc analyses; thus, neither the sample nor the methods were influenced by a bias in support of gay parents.
The first of these community-based studies was based on data from a cohort study of 14000 mothers of children born within a particular county in England during 1 year. The study examined the quality of parent-child relationships and socioemotional and gender development in a community sample of 5–7-year-old children with lesbian mothers. Thirty-nine lesbian mother families were compared with 74 two-parent heterosexual families and 60 families headed by single heterosexual mothers.46 No differences were found in maternal warmth, emotional involvement, enjoyment of motherhood, frequency of conflicts, supervision of the child, abnormal behaviors reported by parents or teachers in the child, children's self-esteem, or psychiatric disorders.
In the same study, parents who raised children alone reported greater stress, increased severity of parent-child conflicts, and less warmth, enjoyment of parenting, and imaginative play than did parents in a couple relationship, whether lesbian or heterosexual. Teachers reported more behavioral problems among children in single-parent families than among children who had 2 parents in the home irrespective of their sexual orientation.46
The second study used data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a randomly selected, nationally representative sample of 12105 US adolescents in grades 7 through 12. The authors demonstrated that 12- to 18-year-olds living with 2 women in a “marriage-like” family arrangement (n = 44) were similar to peers whose parents were heterosexual in measures of self-esteem, depression, anxiety, school “connectedness,” and school success. Overall, adolescents reported positive family relationships, including parental warmth, care from others, personal autonomy, and neighborhood integration, and there were no systematic differences between the same-gender and opposite-gender parent families.47
Research exploring the diversity of parental relationships among gay and lesbian partners is just beginning. The legalization of same-gender marriage in Massachusetts in 2004 offers the first true opportunity to study how same-gender marriage affects family life and child development. In addition to the findings discussed above, current research on same-gender couples who have been able to jointly adopt and establish legal ties between children and both parents suggests that legal recognition of same-gender marriage may strengthen ties between partners, their children, and their extended families.48,49
Children's Gender Identity and Sexual Orientation
The gender identity of preadolescent children raised by lesbian mothers has been found consistently to be in line with their biological gender. None of >500 children studied have shown evidence of gender-identity confusion, wished to be the other gender, or consistently engaged in cross-gender behavior. No differences have been found in the toy, game, activity, dress, or friendship preferences of boys or girls who had lesbian mothers, compared with those who had heterosexual mothers.31,34,50–52
Compared with young adults who had heterosexual mothers, men and women who had lesbian mothers were slightly more likely to conside