Study: Teens Do Even Better With Lesbian Parents Than Straight Ones

The researchers found just slight differences between teens raised by stable lesbian couples and those raised by long-term straight couples, but the few points of difference favored the lesbian-led families.

Trudy Ring

Trudy Ring is The Advocate’s senior politics editor and copy chief. She has been a reporter and editor for daily newspapers and LGBTQ+ weeklies/monthlies, trade magazines, and reference books. She is a political junkie who thinks even the wonkiest details are fascinating, and she always loves to see political candidates who are groundbreaking in some way. She enjoys writing about other topics as well, including religion (she’s interested in what people believe and why), literature, theater, and film. Trudy is a proud “old movie weirdo” and loves the Hollywood films of the 1930s and ’40s above all others. Other interests include classic rock music (Bruce Springsteen rules!) and history. Oh, and she was a Jeopardy! contestant back in 1998 and won two games. Not up there with Amy Schneider, but Trudy still takes pride in this achievement.

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Trudy Ring

February 26 2014 9:18 PM EST

November 17 2015 5:28 AM EST

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Teenagers in families with continuously coupled lesbian parents have higher self-esteem and fewer behavior problems than those in families with similarly stable heterosexual parents, a new study indicates.

Researchers compared 51 adolescents who have been participating in the Dutch Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study with a matched group of teens in heterosexual-parent families who were drawn from a large school-based survey in the Netherlands, reports the Williams Institute. The institute, a think tank at the University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, focuses on legal issues related to sexual orientation and gender identity, and was sponsor of the study, recently published in the Journal of Child and Family Studies.

The study is the first comparing adolescent well-being in families headed by stable lesbian couples and those headed by a continuously coupled man and woman, according to the Williams Institute. Overall, the teens in both groups were similar, "but the few differences found on psychological well-being favored the adolescents in lesbian two-mother families," the study's authors wrote.

"Child and adolescent outcomes have more to do with the quality of parenting than the sexual orientation of the parents," coauthor Nanette Gartrell, a Williams Institute visiting distinguished scholar, told The Huffington Post. Others involved in the study were principal investigator Henny Bos, Ph.D., who is a professor at the University of Amsterdam and a former visiting international scholar at the Williams Institute, and Loes van Gelderen, Ph.D.