Some people argue that a child needs a mother and father in their home so two same-sex parents won’t do as good a job at bringing up a child. In fact, a survey carried out by Barnardo’s found that a third of Britons believed that heterosexual couples were better parents than homosexual couples. However, in 2006, the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that after 25 years of research they had found, “no relationship between parents’ sexual orientation and any measure of a child’s emotional, psychological and behavioral adjustment”. This shows that having a secure, emotionally stable home is what affects the child, not the sexuality of the child’s parents. The American Psychological Association said, “not a single study has found children of gay or lesbian parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” They then concluded that...
Some people argue that a child needs a mother and father in their home so two same-sex parents won’t do as good a job at bringing up a child. In fact, a survey carried out by Barnardo’s found that a third of Britons believed that heterosexual couples were better parents than homosexual couples. However, in 2006, the American Academy of Pediatrics concluded that after 25 years of research they had found, “no relationship between parents’ sexual orientation and any measure of a child’s emotional, psychological and behavioral adjustment”. This shows that having a secure, emotionally stable home is what affects the child, not the sexuality of the child’s parents. The American Psychological Association said, “not a single study has found children of gay or lesbian parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents.” They then concluded that “home environments provided by gay and lesbian parents are as likely as those provided by heterosexual parents to support and enable children’s psychological growth.” So no, a child does not need one male and one female parent in order to be raised right, they just need to have a loving, safe environment with supportive people around them that will allow them to flourish.
In actual fact, not only are same-sex parented families as good as opposite-sex parented families, but they could actually be better for the child. In a 2013 study by Cambridge University which studied 130 families, they found that “Gay fathers appeared to have more interaction with their children and the children of gay fathers had particularly busy social lives.”. This will obviously benefit the child as having two present; supportive parents will make the child feel safe and loved. Gay fathers were also found to be less likely to report symptoms of depression compared to straight or lesbian couples which show that gay parents are happier which will have a direct effect on the child, making them happier too. Because gay couples can’t exactly have a child by accident as heterosexual couples can, they choose when they are ready to have a child, and because of the lengthy process of adopting, same-sex couples are only going to adopt a child if they are 100% certain that that is what they want to do, meaning that all homosexual parents will be committed emotionally and financially to providing a good environment for the child to grow up in. This is in comparison to heterosexual parented homes where 40% of pregnancies are ‘unplanned,’ and in some cases, this leads to the child feeling unwanted in their home.
