{"id":65175,"date":"2022-10-10T01:26:12","date_gmt":"2022-10-10T05:26:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/world.edu\/?p=65175"},"modified":"2022-10-10T01:26:12","modified_gmt":"2022-10-10T05:26:12","slug":"parenthood-beyond-gender-and-sexuality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/world.edu\/parenthood-beyond-gender-and-sexuality\/","title":{"rendered":"Parenthood, beyond gender and sexuality"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\n“I believe this child should have the opportunity and the option to live in a non-lesbian world.”\u00a0It was with this declaration that an American judge, in 1995,\u00a0preferred to entrust the custody<\/a>\u00a0of Cassey, 12 years old, to John Ward, his biological father, already condemned for the murder of a former spouse, rather than to Mary Ward, her biological mother, in a relationship at the time of the trial with a woman, and who would therefore have raised her in a lesbian family.<\/p>\n

Ward v.\u00a0Ward is reported by Scottish psychologist\u00a0Susan Golombok<\/a>\u00a0in her book\u00a0We are family<\/em>\u00a0, published in 2020. The example serves in a way as a yardstick by which to account for the role of social science research in the evolution of conceptions of the \u201cgood\u201d family.<\/p>\n

Indeed, the first research on non-heterosexual families was carried out in response to the need to develop psycho-legal expertise to assess the parental skills of lesbian mothers divorced from a heterosexual spouse and whose custody of the children was contested by their ex-spouses on the basis of their lesbianism.<\/p>\n

Four decades of research<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Beyond the anecdote, Susan Golombok underlines how much the perception of the capacity of homosexual parents to provide a healthy and adequate environment for their child has evolved during the last decades.<\/p>\n

We now have more than four decades of research in psychology and sociology, which have sought to find out whether the homosexuality of the parents was likely to have an impact in terms of parenting skills (for example their ability to supervise and to reassure their child), the well-being and development of children, their relationships with their peers, the propensity of children to identify as cisgender or heterosexual, etc.<\/p>\n

This research clearly demonstrates that same-sex parenting or lesbo-parenting\u00a0does not change the well-being and psychological development of children<\/a>\u00a0.\u00a0Thus, compared to children of heterosexual parents, children raised by two mothers or by two fathers do not have more difficulty identifying their gender, do not experience more anxiety or difficulties with social integration, and are not more at risk of experiencing sexual abuse or becoming gay or lesbian.<\/p>\n

The only difference that consistently emerges is the openness of their children (once grown up) to questioning the assumption of heterosexuality to which they are subjected and to experimenting\u00a0with partners of different genders<\/a>\u00a0.
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