Adoptive parents
invest more time and financial resources in their
children than biological parents, according to a new
national study challenging arguments that have been
used to oppose same-sex marriage and adoption by gays.
The study, published in the new issue of the American
Sociological Review, found that couples who
adopt spend more money on their children and invest more
time on such activities as reading to them, eating
together, and talking with them about their problems.
"One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that
they really want children, and they go to
extraordinary means to have them," Indiana University
sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study's three
coauthors, said in a telephone interview Monday.
"Adoptive parents face a culture where, to many other
people, adoption is not real parenthood," Powell said.
"What they're trying to do is compensate.... They
recognize the barriers they face, and it sets the
stage for them to be better parents."
Powell and his colleagues examined data from 13,000
households with first-graders in the family. The data
was part of a detailed survey called the Early
Childhood Longitudinal Study, sponsored by the U.S.
Department of Education and other agencies.
The researchers said 161 families in the survey were headed
by two adoptive parents, and they rated better overall
than families with biological parents on an array of
criteria, including helping with homework, parental
involvement in school, exposure to cultural
activities, and family attendance at religious services. The
only category in which adoptive parents fared worse
was the frequency of talking with parents of other
children.
The researchers noted that adoptive couples, in general,
were older and wealthier than biological parents, but
they said the adoptive parents still had an advantage,
albeit smaller, when the data was reanalyzed to
account for income inequality. In particular, the
researchers said, adoptive parents had a pronounced
edge over single-parent and stepparent families.
The researchers said their findings call into question the
long-standing argument that children are best off with
their biological parents. Such arguments were included
in state supreme court rulings last year in New York
and Washington that upheld laws against same-sex marriage.
The researchers said gay and lesbian parents may react to
discrimination by taking extra, compensatory steps to
promote their children's welfare. "Ironically, the
same social context that creates struggles for these
alternative families may also set the stage for them to
excel in some measures of parenting," the study
concluded.
An opponent of same-sex marriage, Peter Sprigg of the
conservative Family Research Council, noted that the
study focused on male-female adoptive couples, not on
same-sex couples, and he questioned whether it shed any
new light on adoptive parenting by gays. Sprigg, the
research council's vice president for policy, said he
warmly supports adoption but believes it is best
undertaken by married, heterosexual couples.
Another conservative analyst, psychologist Bill Maier of
Focus on the Family, said the authors of the new study
seemed to be pursuing a political agenda in support of
same-sex marriage. "Put simply, gay adoption creates
families that are motherless or fatherless by design,
permanently depriving children of either a mother or a
father," Maier said.
Adam Pertman, executive director of the Evan B. Donaldson
Adoption Institute, welcomed the study's findings but
cautioned against possible exaggerated interpretations
of it. "It's an affirmation that there are all sorts
of families that are good for kids," he said.
"Adoptive parents aren't less good or better. They just
bring different benefits to the table. In terms of how
families are formed, it should be a level playing
field."
The study was funded by the National Science Foundation, the
Spencer Foundation, and the American Educational
Research Association. Powell's coauthors were Laura
Hamilton, a doctoral student at Indiana University,
and Simon Cheng, a sociology professor at the University of
Connecticut. (David Crary, AP)