Having attended the launch of the Demos pamphlet “Building Character” a couple of weeks ago, it was quite interesting to see how the findings of the report were covered in the press. Mostly, it seems, it is a sidenote in a hoo ha about lesbian parents.
I remember taking note that there was a journalist from The Sunday Times behind me. Lo and behold in The Sunday Times that week: attention grabbing headline (albeit at the bottom of the page, somewhere in the middle of the paper), “Lesbian parents better at raising children“. Assemblage of bits on lesbian parents, gay adoption, a quote from Mary Cheney, that hadn’t found a home in the print of the Times yet, spun around a quote from Stephen Scott who was on the panel of the Building Character event.
Stephen Scott of the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners, which joint-hosted the event with Demos, did refer in passing to research that suggested lesbian parents were “better” than a man and a woman. Hmm, and then strangely that little juicy snippet was what was most discussed from the whole thing in the papers. Discussed by The Daily Mail and Jeremy Clarkson…
Thing is, Jeremy Clarkson’s column in The Sunday Times the next week pointed quite well to how silly it was to say that, definitively, lesbians make better parents. And (worryingly?) Clarkson was funnier than I thought he was (although still nowhere near properly funny, he was starting from a very low estimation). Similarly, a piece on the blog of the think tank Civitas questions what this research was. Civitas is a think tank that I don’t hold in very high esteem either, and amusingly all the quotes from “newspaper reports” were from that original Sunday Times article, so maybe it wasn’t as “widely reported” as Civitas insinuates. (Shame on me too for only scouring the pages of The Sunday Times for references to something I attended. At least by attending I know that Scott’s mention of lesbian parents was not in a speech *ahem, Civitas*).
Anyhow, it’s come to Clarkson and Civitas (god forbid) to asking what-the-hell-is-this-research?!?!? Shame on you, Mr. most-popular Sunday broadsheet, for such a cobbled-together article.
What I found on the NAPP website was “Evaluating the evidence: are lesbians better parents?“. This, quite rightly, tentatively concludes that:
“Although children with lesbian mothers, on average, do slightly (but significantly) better on some measures than children raised by opposite sex parents, a positive relationship with one’s father is also strongly associated with positive child outcomes… Research consistently and clearly suggests that regardless of parent gender and family structure, children who report a close and positive relationship with their mother and father are more likely to feel good about themselves and do better in school and later adulthood.” [italics in original]
The point about good parent-child relationships was the very point of the whole Building Character event where this recent lesbian parent hoo ha began. It was the point being made when this, rather distracting point, was thrown in: quality relationships matter more than family structure.
The research on lesbian parents, from what I have seen, does seem rather dubious though. I took a look at Golombok et al “Children with Lesbian Parents: A Community Study“, the first cited research in the above menioned NAPP review. Here I’d be inclined to agree with Jeremy Clarkson; “You can’t possibly draw any conclusions after testing 20 lesbians.” The sample was tiny. Not quite as tiny as 20, but a grand total of 39 lesbian-mother families.
As I, and Civitas (hmm), suspected it also appeared that the lesbian-mother families on average were of a higher socioeconomic status that the straight-mother families. The qualities of better parenting were defined as less use of smacking, greater frequency of imaginative play, etc. which also correlate well with middle-class families in general. Findings from elsewhere that daughters of lesbians are more likely to aspire to be a doctor or lawyer or “professions that were traditionally considered male” and children brought up in an all-female household are “more confident in championing social justice” (see that first Sunday Times article), could also readily be attributed to these being more middle-class traits. It does not necessarilly follow that lesbian parents are a causal factor of this “better” parenting. A common sense answer would be that lesbian parents are more likely to be middle-class and these determinants of better parenting are generally reflective of middle-class parenting. Girls from your average middle-class home want to be doctors and lawyers and were most likely not smacked either.
Elsewhere in that Sunday Times (15 Nov- I am so slow in writing stuff. Have a decent memory though) were graphs of the number of women compared to men entering the professions across the last 3-4 decades – they all steadily climbed upward. Annoyingly the graphs aren’t on the web version, but I can tell you that last year 60% of new solicitors were women. But I digress…
Yes, so this study by Golombok et al did not account for socio-economic status bearing an infuence on the results. They got some stats on the socio-economic make up of the sample, but then dismissed its importance. I think it’s important. The covariates the study accounts for are instead just the child’s age and the number of children in the family. I’m not a social scientist (yet…) but I wouldn’t agree that “no group difference was found for social class” when about 1/10 lesbian mothers had no qualifications compared to 1/4 straight mothers. Surely it may well be something like this that has the greater impact on parenting style and children’s aspirations?
Without good longitudinal studies of gay parenting, which also factors in variables of social class and education, and is done on a much larger scale of 39, we shouldn’t be making any suggestions as to lesbians being “better parents.” And refraining from slipping a remark as Stephen Scott did at the Demos launch wouldn’t go a miss either…
“
No comments:
Post a Comment