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New study: children of same-sex parents have more emotional problems

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I like to have all the research papers I need on hand to “show my work” to people who want to know why I have certain views on moral issues. This study entitled “Emotional Problems among Children with Same-Sex Parents: Difference by Definition” was published in the peer-reviewed journal “British Journal of Education, Society and Behavioural Science” is good research.

Here’s what it says:

Aims: To test whether small non-random sample findings that children with same-sex parents suffer no disadvantage in emotional well-being can be replicated in a large population sample; and examine the correlates of any differences discovered.

A big sample size makes the study more reliable:

Methodology: Using a representative sample of 207,007 children, including 512 with same-sex parents, from the U.S. National Health Interview Survey, prevalence in the two groups was compared for twelve measures of emotional problems, developmental problems, and affiliated service and treatment usage, with controls for age, sex, and race of child and parent education and income. Instruments included the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) and the Kessler Scale of Psychological Distress (SPD). Bivariate logistic regression models tested the effect of parent psychological distress, family instability, child peer stigmatization and biological parentage, both overall and by opposite-sex family structure.

This is the key part. “Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent… for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents.” That’s not what you’ll see on TV or in the corporate news media, but that’s what you find if you’re looking for peer-reviewed studies with good methodology and large sample sizes.

Results: Emotional problems were over twice as prevalent (minimum risk ratio (RR) 2.4, 95% confidence interval (CI) 1.7-3.0) for children with same-sex parents than for children with opposite-sex parents. Risk was elevated in the presence of parent psychological distress (RR 2.7, CI 1.8-4.3, p (t) < .001), moderated by family instability (RR 1.3, CI 1.2-1.4) and unaffected by stigmatization (RR 2.4, CI 1.4-4.2), though these all had significant direct effects on emotional problems. However, biological parentage nullified risk alone and in combination with any iteration of factors. Joint biological parents are associated with the lowest rate of child emotional problems by a factor of 4 relative to same-sex parents, accounting for the bulk of the overall same-sex/opposite-sex difference.

And here’s the conclusion:

Conclusion: Joint biological parentage, the modal condition for opposite-sex parents but not possible for same-sex parents, sharply differentiates between the two groups on child emotional problem outcomes. The two groups are different by definition. Intact opposite-sex marriage ensures children of the persistent presence of their joint biological parents; same-sex marriage ensures the opposite. However, further work is needed to determine the mechanisms involved.

I blogged recently about another study that found other differences between the children of same-sex couples and the children of heterosexual couples.

From a public policy point of view, there are always going to be times where there is a conflict between the needs of small children, and the wants of selfish adults. In that case, I think we should side with the small children, since they are more vulnerable. It’s alarming to me to see many “conservatives” put the desires of adults over the needs of children. That doesn’t seem like a good position to take, morally speaking. Children do better when they are raised by a Mom and a Dad. We should pass laws to encourage grown-ups to live their lives in a way that they don’t harm children.

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Study: children of naturally married couples outperform children of same-sex couples

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Whenever I debate a controversial issue, I like to go straight to the studies in order to let the evidence speak for itself. Although it’s difficult to convince someone on the opposite side to change their mind, usually people in the middle will side with the person who has evidence, instead of the person who is crying the loudest and telling anecdotal stories that may or may even not be true.

The Public Discourse reports on a study out of Canada.

Excerpt:

A new academic study based on the Canadian census suggests that a married mom and dad matter for children. Children of same-sex coupled households do not fare as well.

There is a new and significant piece of evidence in the social science debate about gay parenting and the unique contributions that mothers and fathers make to their children’s flourishing. A study published last week in the journal Review of the Economics of the Household—analyzing data from a very large, population-based sample—reveals that the children of gay and lesbian couples are only about 65 percent as likely to have graduated from high school as the children of married, opposite-sex couples. And gender matters, too: girls are more apt to struggle than boys, with daughters of gay parents displaying dramatically low graduation rates.

Unlike US-based studies, this one evaluates a 20 percent sample of the Canadian census, where same-sex couples have had access to all taxation and government benefits since 1997 and to marriage since 2005.

While in the US Census same-sex households have to be guessed at based on the gender and number of self-reported heads-of-household, young adults in the Canadian census were asked, “Are you the child of a male or female same-sex married or common law couple?” While study author and economist Douglas Allen noted that very many children in Canada who live with a gay or lesbian parent are actually living with a single mother—a finding consonant with that detected in the 2012 New Family Structures Study—he was able to isolate and analyze hundreds of children living with a gay or lesbian couple (either married or in a “common law” relationship akin to cohabitation).

So the study is able to compare—side by side—the young-adult children of same-sex couples and opposite-sex couples, as well as children growing up in single-parent homes and other types of households. Three key findings stood out to Allen:

children of married opposite-sex families have a high graduation rate compared to the others; children of lesbian families have a very low graduation rate compared to the others; and the other four types [common law, gay, single mother, single father] are similar to each other and lie in between the married/lesbian extremes.

Employing regression models and series of control variables, Allen concludes that the substandard performance cannot be attributed to lower school attendance or the more modest education of gay or lesbian parents. Indeed, same-sex parents were characterized by higher levels of education, and their children were more likely to be enrolled in school than even those of married, opposite-sex couples. And yet their children are notably more likely to lag in finishing their own schooling.

[…]The truly unique aspect of Allen’s study, however, may be its ability to distinguish gender-specific effects of same-sex households on children. He writes:

the particular gender mix of a same-sex household has a dramatic difference in the association with child graduation. Consider the case of girls. . . . Regardless of the controls and whether or not girls are currently living in a gay or lesbian household, the odds of graduating from high school are considerably lower than any other household type. Indeed, girls living in gay households are only 15 percent as likely to graduate compared to girls from opposite sex married homes.

Thus although the children of same-sex couples fare worse overall, the disparity is unequally shared, but is instead based on the combination of the gender of child and gender of parents. Boys fare better—that is, they’re more likely to have finished high school—in gay households than in lesbian households. For girls, the opposite is true. Thus the study undermines not only claims about “no differences” but also assertions that moms and dads are interchangeable. They’re not.

With a little digging, I found the abstract of the study:

Almost all studies of same-sex parenting have concluded there is “no difference” in a range of outcome measures for children who live in a household with same-sex parents compared to children living with married opposite-sex parents. Recently, some work based on the US census has suggested otherwise, but those studies have considerable drawbacks. Here, a 20% sample of the 2006 Canada census is used to identify self-reported children living with same-sex parents, and to examine the association of household type with children’s high school graduation rates. This large random sample allows for control of parental marital status, distinguishes between gay and lesbian families, and is large enough to evaluate differences in gender between parents and children. Children living with gay and lesbian families in 2006 were about 65 % as likely to graduate compared to children living in opposite sex marriage families. Daughters of same-sex parents do considerably worse than sons.

The author of the study is a professor of economics at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia. His PhD in economics is from the University of Washington. A previous study had shown that gay relationships typically have far more instability (they last for more shorter times). That’s not good for children either. Another study featured in the Atlantic talked about how gay relationships have much higher rates of domestic violence. That’s not good for children either. So we have three reasons to think that normalizing gay relationships as “marriage” would not be good for children.

The reason I am posting this is because I want people to understand why social conservatives like me propose these laws defining and promoting marriage. We do favor natural marriage for the same reason that we oppose no-fault divorce, and for the same reason why we oppose welfare for single mothers (it encourages single motherhood). We don’t want to encourage people to deprive children of their mother or their father. We look at the research, and we decide that children need their mother and father. Given the choice between the needs of the child and restraining the freedom of the adults, we prefer the child’s need for her mother and father. It’s not just arbitrary rules, there is a reason behind the rules.

But children are not commodities. They have certain needs right out of the box. Adults should NOT be thinking about how to duct-tape a child onto any old relationship that doesn’t offer the same safety and stability that opposite sex marriage offers. We should be passing laws to strengthen marriage in order to protect children, not to weaken it. Libertarians don’t want to do that, because they want adults to be free to do as they please, at the expense of children.  Libertarians think that the adults should be able to negotiate private contracts and have no obligations to any children who are present, or who may be present later.

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How many Nobel-prize winning scientists support intelligent design?

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I think a lot of young people give up on design in the universe because they 1) don’t know the evidence for design and 2) don’t want to be considered to be stupid when confronted with intelligent atheists. For those people, it can be useful to point them to smart people who have worked through the evidence for design, and concluded that the universe (and life) is the product of design.

Here’s the story from Evolution News:

Earlier this week, John West reported on a major new exhibition on faith and science in Washington, DC, tackling the question of whether the Bible impeded or inspired the rise of modern science. (Judging from the historical record, “inspired” is clearly the correct answer.) In the article, he mentioned another Nobel Prize-winning scientist who endorsed the idea of an intelligent design behind the universe, using that phrase explicitly. This was news to me. He is physicist Arthur Holly Compton — see the slide above, which Dr. West shared from the exhibition.

Compton’s remark was, “The chance of a world such as ours occurring without intelligent design becomes more and more remote as we learn of its wonders.” Interesting. He said that in 1940.

[…]Compton joins fellow Nobel Prize-winning physicists Charles Townes (UC Berkeley) and Brian Josephson (Cambridge University) who have likewise come out for ID as a legitimate interpretation of the scientific evidence. (Townes passed away in 2015.) To those names you could add two more, Sir John B. Gurdon (Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine) and Gerhard Ertl (Nobel Prize in Chemistry) who, along with Dr. Josephson, endorsed the Discovery Institute Press book by chemist and ID proponent Marcos Eberlin, Foresight: How the Chemistry of Life Reveals Planning and Purpose (2019).

In case you’re wondering what intelligent design is, this simple article is pretty good:

Intelligent design — often called “ID” — is a scientific theory which holds that some features of the universe and living things are best explained by an intelligent cause rather than an undirected process such as natural selection. ID theorists argue that intelligent design can be inferred by finding in nature the type of information and complexity which in our experience arises from an intelligent cause.

Proponents of neo-Darwinian evolution contend that the information in life arose via blind, mechanistic processes that show no scientific evidence of guidance by intelligent design. ID proponents contend that the information in life does not appear to have an unguided origin, but arose via purposeful, intelligently guided processes. Both claims are scientifically testable using the standard methods of science. But ID theorists say that when we use the scientific method to explore nature, the evidence points away from blind material causes, and reveals intelligent design.

The cell confirms our expectations from design. Our DNA contains incredible amounts of encoded information. Living cells transform this encoded chemical message into machines which are engineered to perform necessary biochemical functions. The conversion of DNA into protein relies upon a software-like system of commands and biochemical codes.  This is an information processing system which Bill Gates has described as “like a computer program, but far, far more advanced than any software we’ve ever created.”

This short video is a good introduction for those who prefer to watch rather than read:

By the way, about that conversation with Josephson. I was walking in the hall with him, and discussing intelligent design. He said “it’s easy to explain complexes sequences that conform to a pattern. I could write a program that would generate the first 100 prime numbers in 3 lines of code.” I told him that I was a software engineer, and that I was familiar with what it takes to “write a simple program”. I said that he would need computer hardware, firmware, an operating system, a compiler, and something to run the program. “And that’s where you’re smuggling in your specified complexity”, I said. I don’t remember what he said, but I’m delighted that he came around eventually.