Rocky families, not same-sex parents, blamed for kids’ troubles in adulthood
New analysis rebuts earlier study linking gay households to problems later in life
By Bruce Bower
Family instability — not gay parents, as concluded in an earlier, controversial study — primarily causes children to develop more than their share of life problems when they hit adulthood, a new analysis finds.
Kids who experience numerous changes in family structure do particularly poorly as grown-ups, whether they grow up with same-sex parents, both of their biological parents or a single parent, says Stanford University sociologist Michael Rosenfeld. It’s the accumulation of various family transitions, including divorce and a single parent’s partner, or even a grandparent, moving in, that heralds later problems for children, Rosenfeld reports September 2 in Sociological Science.