Abstract: This research focused on behavioral functioning of children conceived via gestational surrogacy and raised by gay fathers. Gay fathers from 68 families with children aged 3–10 years completed the Achenbach Child Behavior Checklist. Their scores were compared to those from a normative sample of parents matched for parent’s occupation and children’s gender, age, and race/ethnicity. Children of gay fathers received significantly lower scores on internalizing (anxiety, depression) and externalizing (aggression, rule-breaking) than children in the comparison sample. Most notably, daughters of gay fathers had significantly lower internalizing scores than did daughters in the national database. Gay fathers also completed measures of parenting styles, social support, and perceived prejudice. Fathers who reported less authoritarian or permissive parenting, more positive coparenting, and more social support from friends had children with fewer behavior problems. Gay fathers’ reports of family members receiving higher levels of antigay microaggressions were associated with parents’ greater stigma consciousness, more anger/aggression from spouse/partner, and less positive parenting and coparenting. Results are discussed in terms of gay and heterosexual parents’ gender-related socialization of daughters’ internalizing problems and the impact of minority stress on same-sex couples’ parenting.
Why would same-sex parents have children whose behavioral functioning is sometimes better than the functioning of heterosexual parents’ children? One possible reason is that male-male and female-female parents who have children in the context of a same-sex relationship do not get pregnant by accident. By contrast, surveys of women in the general population indicate that 45% of pregnancies in the United States are unintended (this includes pregnancies that are terminated; Finer & Zolna, 2016). Obviously, many unintended pregnancies of heterosexual parents result in children who are very much loved and nurtured; however, many other such children remain unwanted. By contrast, in the case of same-sex parents, having children via surrogacy always involves extensive effort, planning, and very high financial costs. These children are very much wanted. Thus, a group of gay fathers via surrogacy may start out with a higher level of planning ability and greater commitment to having children than a normative group of parents in the general population may have, which in turn could contribute to these gay fathers’ better parenting and better child outcomes overall.
Our results were mostly consistent with the second hypothesis—that positive couple interaction and more effective parenting styles would be associated with more positive functioning among children. These findings indicate that gay fathers who report utilizing more permissive or authoritarian styles of parenting—and who engage in less positive coparenting—have children with more internalizing and externalizing problems. These results are similar to findings from studies of different-sex parents who use more authoritarian and permissive parenting styles and have less positive coparenting (cf. Darling, 1999; and McHale & Lindahl, 2011 for reviews). In this regard, the determinants of child outcomes seem similar in many different types of families. The processes and quality of parenting appear to be more important to children’s well-being than does a family’s composition (whether the family is headed by same-sex male or female coparents, single parents, stepparents, grandparents, etc.).
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