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Essay on Same-Sex Parenting and Child Development

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Same-Sex Parenting In the last ten years, many established gay men and lesbians have been increasingly undertaking parenthood through donor insemination, surrogacy, or fostering and adoption (McCann, 2005). Thus, a new type of family formation in American society has been generated. Due to the formation of same-sex households, gay and lesbian parenting is no longer a concept. This type of parenting has become a reality which society as a whole is struggling to accept (McCann, 2005). In 2010, the U.S. Census Bureau counted gay marriages in its survey for the first time in order to provide official data for researchers and policy makers (Wagner, 2010). Such data could help track trend in gay and lesbian family formation and impacts on …show more content…

Even though homosexual couples tend to have better assets to raise children than heterosexual couples, increased parenting stress, parental conflict and relationship dissatisfaction appear to be associated with higher levels of psychological problems among their children, as is the case for children raised in heterosexual families (Wagner, 2010). Such difficulties and dilemmas raise questions concerning gay men’s and lesbians’ right to parenthood and the damaging effect on the children in their care (Wagner, 2010). One of the important questions about same-sex parenting is that whether parental sexual orientation affects child development. Early research on children with lesbian and gay parents began with studies focused on cases in which children had been born in the context of a heterosexual marriage (McCann, 2005). Some researchers compared development among children of divorced lesbian mothers with that among children of divorced heterosexual mothers and found few significant differences (McCann, 2005). For children who were born and raised in a context of homosexual marriage, the Bay Area Families Study conducted by Charlotte J. Patterson (2006) showed that the participants, who were a group of four to nine years old children adopted at the early ages and raised by lesbian mothers, had the same

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