Abstract: Findings are presented from the second phase of a UK longitudinal study of 33 gay father, 35 lesbian mother, and 43 heterosexual parent families when their adopted children reached early adolescence. Participants predominantly lived in urban/suburban areas and were mostly white and well‐educated. Standardized interviews, observations, and questionnaires of parental mental health, parent–child relationships, and adolescent adjustment were administered to parents, children, and teachers between 2016 and 2018. There were few differences between family types. However, adjustment problems had increased in all family types, with better parenting quality and parental mental health associated with fewer adjustment problems. The findings contribute to adoption policy and practice, and to theoretical understanding of the role of parental gender in child development.
Discussion
Our findings lend partial support to the prediction that the quality of parenting in gay father families would be higher than in heterosexual parent families. The only variable that differed between the two family types was reciprocal interaction on the observational measure, with greater levels of reciprocity observed between gay fathers and their children than between heterosexual parents and their children. However, there were no differences between the gay father and heterosexual parent families for the other variables derived from the observational, interview or questionnaire assessment of parenting quality. Moreover, the hypothesis that gay fathers would show more positive mental health than heterosexual parents was not supported by the findings. As predicted, there were no significant differences between the gay father and lesbian mother families for any of the measures of parenting quality or parental mental health.
It seems, therefore, that gay fathers show a similar quality of parenting to both lesbian mothers and heterosexual parents when their adopted children reached adolescence. This finding is consistent with studies of adoptive gay father families with younger children (Farr, 2017; Farr & Patterson, 2013; Farr et al., 2010a, 2010b; Goldberg & Smith, 2013). Contrary to the view that fathers are less suited to child rearing than are mothers, the only difference in parenting that emerged reflected more positive parenting by gay fathers than by heterosexual parents. Thus, our findings suggest that gay father families continue to provide a positive family environment for their adopted children as they reach early adolescence.
With respect to adolescent adjustment, the hypothesis that adolescents in gay father families would show higher levels of adjustment than adolescents in heterosexual parent families was not supported; there were no differences in externalizing or internalizing problems as measured by the SDQ between adolescents in the two family types. In addition, the proportion of adolescents with total SDQ scores above the cut‐off for psychiatric disorder did not differ between the gay father and heterosexual parent families, irrespective of whether the questionnaire was completed by parents, teachers, or the adolescents themselves, although there was a nonsignificant trend toward a lower proportion of adolescents in the gay father than in the heterosexual parent families obtaining scores above the clinical cut‐off. There was also no difference between adolescents from gay father and heterosexual parent families in the child psychiatrist’s ratings of severity of psychiatric disorder. As expected, the gay father families did not differ from the lesbian mother families for any of the measures of adolescent adjustment.
A large number of adolescents in all family types showed evidence of psychiatric disorder. Around one‐third of children had parent‐rated SDQ scores above the clinical cut‐off point, a proportion that is approximately three times greater than the 10% who obtain SDQ scores in the clinical range according to UK general population norms (Goodman & Goodman, 2012). Moreover, 53.8% of the adolescents was rated as having a psychiatric disorder by a child psychiatrist who was unaware of their family background, and one‐third showed multiple disorders, which illustrates the complexity of adjustment problems that many of the adoptees were experiencing.
These findings are not surprising given the high rates of mental health problems shown by children adopted from the care system (Dozier, & Rutter, 2008; Pinderhughes & Brodzinksy, 2019). Although detailed information on the children’s preadoption histories was not available for the entire sample, the children had all been removed from their birth families because of maltreatment, including neglect, emotional or physical abuse, parental drug or alcohol misuse, and domestic violence, all of which are associated with adolescent mental health problems (Cicchetti & Toth, 2015).
As predicted, both externalizing and internalizing problems increased from Phase 1 to Phase 2 of the study in all family types. Whilst externalizing problems remained higher than internalizing problems at adolescence, which is consistent with the literature on the psychological adjustment of adopted children (Juffer & van IJzendoorn, 2005), there was a greater increase in internalizing than externalizing problems over time. These findings are consistent with Brodzinsky’s psychosocial theory of adjustment to adoption which predicts an increase in psychological difficulties among adopted children at adolescence (Brodzinsky, Radice, Huffman, & Merkler, 1987) and with previous research which has documented an increase in adopted children’s adjustment problems in middle childhood (Brodzinsky, 1993).
As adopted children develop, they become more aware of the complexities associated with adoption, often leading to confusion and uncertainty (Brodzinsky, 1987). Brodzinsky (1987) posits that children’s confusion represents the beginning of the adaptive grieving process, whereby children begin to process the loss of their birth families. Since loss typically involves shock, denial, protest, despair, and eventually recovery and reintegration, Brodzinsky (1987) suggests that the increase in adopted children’s behavior problems is often a reflection of the normal process of adaptive grieving. This adaptive grieving process extends into adolescence where adoptees do not only grieve their birth families, but also the part of themselves they feel is lost (Brodzinsky, 1987, 2011). Adoptees often lack knowledge about their birth family and the reasons for their relinquishment which can make it more difficult to form a complete sense of self. Moreover, for adoptees with adverse early life experiences, such as maltreatment and neglect, making sense of this information can be painful and difficult to integrate into their sense of self (Neil, 2000).
Regarding predictors of adolescent adjustment, we found that, over and above the stability in externalizing problems, lower levels of parental mental health problems at Phase 2, and higher levels of parenting quality at Phase 2, were associated with lower levels of adolescent externalizing problems. Additionally, over and above the stability in internalizing problems, lower levels of parental mental health problems at Phase 2 were associated with lower levels of adolescent internalizing problems. Thus, in line with developmental systems theory (Overton, 2015), parents who develop positive relationships with their children, and who themselves had low levels of mental health problems, were more likely to have adolescents with lower levels of psychological disorder. The cross‐sectional nature of this association precludes any conclusion about the direction of effects; the higher levels of problem behaviors in the children may have contributed toward poorer parental mental health. This finding is in line with the clinical and research literature on predictors of psychological problems in children adopted from the care system, which points to more positive outcomes for families in which adoptive parents are able to cope with their children’s difficult behavior, have realistic expectations of their children’s functioning and behavior, and show high levels of warmth and low levels of hostility toward their children (Ji et al., 2010; Rushton & Dance, 2006).
Parenting quality and parental mental health problems at Phase 1 were not predictive of externalizing and internalizing problems at adolescence. Nevertheless, the measures of positive parenting at Phase 1 and Phase 2 were correlated with each other, as were the measures of parental mental health, indicating that positive parenting and parental mental health problems when the children were young contributed indirectly to the associations between these variables and adolescent adjustment.
The study had a number of limitations. First, differences between family types may not have been detected due to the modest samples sizes. However, to the extent that significant differences between family types were not identified due to insufficient power, these differences would have been small. In addition, we found partial measurement invariance (i.e., configural and metric but not intercept invariance) for our latent factor of positive parenting as rated from the interview at each phase of the study. However, while the lack of strict factorial invariance limited our ability to examine changes in positive parenting over time, it should be noted that studies explicitly testing measurement invariance of parenting typically rely upon questionnaire ratings (Widaman, Ferrer, & Conger, 2010), and, consistent with our findings, those who have examined observational ratings have also demonstrated partial measurement invariance (e.g., Hughes, Lindberg, & Devine, 2018). Although the inter‐rater reliability of the parental responsiveness scale of the observational measure was low, rather than being unreliable in detecting low parental responsiveness, inspection of the data showed that this was due to ceiling effects in these highly functioning families, as most obtained scores at the top of the scale.
Advantages of the study include its longitudinal design, and the use of a multimethod (interview, observation, and questionnaire) and multi‐informant (both parents, child, teacher and child psychiatrist) approach. Because stigmatized groups such as gay fathers may tend to present their families in the best possible light, the use of an observational measure in which it is more difficult to “fake good” (Kerig & Lindahl, 2000), and the collection of data from teachers and the adolescents, provided validation for the parents’ reports, as did the ratings of children’s adjustment by an independent child psychiatrist. A further advantage is the use of analytical techniques that accounted for the lack of independence of data from family members.
Overall, the adolescents in the study showed high levels of adjustment difficulties, irrespective of whether they were being raised by gay fathers, lesbian mothers or heterosexual parents, and in all family types, higher levels of family functioning were associated with lower levels of adolescent adjustment difficulties. Taken together, these findings indicate that adoptive parents and children need to continue to receive support, especially from middle childhood to early adolescence, when identity issues and associated adjustment problems are likely to arise. Furthermore, the association between parent mental health and child adjustment indicates that adoptive parents would benefit from the availability of support services for their own mental health as well as their children’s adjustment problems. As parents and children exert reciprocal influences on each other, supporting adoptive parents’ mental health would be beneficial not only for adoptive parents, but also for adopted children. In line with the growing evidence that family processes are more influential in children’s psychological adjustment than family structure (Golombok, 2015; Lamb, 2012; Patterson, 2009), the findings show that men can be just as competent at parenting as women. Indeed, the only group difference in parenting quality identified between the gay father and heterosexual parent families, reflected more positive functioning in the gay father families. Given the large number of children in need of adoptive families, adoption agencies should give greater consideration to gay couples as prospective adoptive parents.
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