[Miguel]

22. Biller’s (1993) extensive research on parent-child interaction yields the following conclusion: mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. His research concludes that:
• Paternal and maternal differences are stimulating for the infant as they provide contrasting images via differences in mothers‘ and fathers’ dress, their movements, even voices. Because of these differences, infants may prefer mothers when they want to be consoled or soothed and fathers when they want stimulation.
• These differences are important sources of complementary learning for children.
• Where there are strong parental attachments, infants are at a decided developmental advantage compared to those infants who only had close maternal relationships.
• Fathers who are involved with their children stimulated them to explore and investigate whereas mothers focused on pre-structured and predictable activities.
• Parental relationships seem particularly important for boys during the second year of the child’s life, as boys become more father-focused. Unlike boys, girls do not seem to have this consistent focus during this developmental period.

23. Biller’s research demonstrates clearly the importance of mothers and fathers to the healthy development of children, not only in the unique paternal and maternal contributions, but in the complementary nature of those contributions. The following conclusion aptly summarizes his research:

Infants who have two positively involved parents tend to be more curious and eager to explore than those who do not have a close relationship with their fathers….Well-fathered infants are more secure and trusting in branching out in their explorations, and they may be somewhat more advanced in crawling, climbing and manipulating objects.

24. The extensive research spanning decades yields an overwhelming abundance of data supporting the importance of both mothers and fathers to the healthy development of children. Recent evidence is likewise not only supportive, but compellingly demonstrates that a society concerned with optimal child development is most benefited by traditional marriage and married, dual-gender parenting.

Same-sex Couples and Child-rearing:

25. Advocacy groups argue that there are no differences between children raised by same-sex and those raised by opposite-sex parents. The studies on same-sex parenting are quite limited and quite limiting. They are basically restricted to children who were conceived in a heterosexual relationship whose mothers later divorced and self-identified as lesbians. It is these children who were compared to divorced, heterosexual, mother-headed families. A better comparison would have been with children in intact families because the research is clear that children in single parent families are at risk for a variety of difficulties including juvenile criminal offenses, mental illness and poverty. The logical conclusion is that children from both of these family forms are at risk for a number of problems.

26. Studies of children raised by male couples are virtually non-existent. The few available studies are either anecdotal in nature or so plagued by methodological flaws as to make them simply invalid from a scientific perspective. In their excellent review of the existing studies on children raised by homosexual couples (primarily lesbian couples), Lerner and Nagai (2000) reached the following conclusion:

The claim has been made that homosexual parents raise children as effectively as married biological parents. A detailed analysis of the methodologies of the 49 studies, which are put forward to support this claim, shows that they suffer from severe methodological flaws. In addition to their methodological flaws, none of the studies deals adequately with the problem of affirming the null hypothesis, of adequate sample size, and of spurious correlation.

27. Williams (2000) arrived at similar conclusions to those of Lerner and Nagai, but actually went further in his re-analyses of some of the major studies whose authors reported no differences between children raised in lesbian and heterosexual families.

28. In reviewing both the Golombok, Spencer, and Rutter (1983) research and the Golombok and Tasker research (1996), Williams noted that the authors ignored a follow-up study that found that the children of lesbian parents were more likely to have considered and actually engaged in homosexual relationships. In reviewing other studies, Williams found similar omissions. For example, Huggins noted a difference in the variability of self-esteem between children of homosexual and heterosexual parents but did not test for significance. Upon a re-analysis of the data, Williams discovered the difference to be significant. Lewis recorded differences in social and emotional difficulties in the lives of children of homosexual parents but left such data unreported. Patterson (1995) also observed and left unreported similar data in her research.