The outdated views on family structure and lesbian families

Congratulations to Brigette Sainsbury for being a winner in our recent IBSS blog competition! Brigette wrote an excellent blog entry on lesbian parent families.  In her blog she comments on society’s difficulties in accepting lesbian families who conceive through artificial insemination. Furthermore Brigette remarks on the impact this can have on the everyday life of young children. This blog makes for a thoroughly interesting read. Many thanks to Brigette Sainsbury.

Having watched the L Word (a programme about lesbian life in the USA), and seeing the prejudice towards lesbian couple Bette and Tina who conceived a child through a known sperm donor, my eyes were opened to how people perceive lesbian families. This led me to want to found out more about “what is best for the child” and the acceptance of this diverse type of beanpole family.

It is not very often you hear about lesbian families in today’s society. Being such a conservative country and government, the whole gay and lesbian taboo is often played down. The only time you really hear of homosexuality is when celebrities decide they are gay, Lindsay Lohan for example, in which case it is thrown in to the public eye. Other than that, all you hear are damning reports from closed-minded people stuck in the ways of the, ironically called, “New Right”.

For years, members of the New Right have promoted how family is the ‘cornerstone of society’, and yet they are only willing to accept nuclear families as valid ones. Another prominent message they put across is that homosexuality is bad and will be one of the reasons for society’s downfall. But surely if the family is really the ‘cornerstone of society’, should it really matter what it’s structure is as long as it is a healthy and happy one? Should it really matter whether parents are heterosexual or homosexual as long as the child is loved, well cared for and is growing up in a healthy environment? Is that not what is more important?

After searching the IBSS I came across an article called Families in transition: parents, children and grandparents in lesbian families give meaning to ‘doing family’. This article presents research into lesbian-parented families. It produces evidence which shows that ‘the outcomes of children in lesbian-parented families world wide demonstrate convincingly that children’s psychosocial adjustment and intellectual development is influenced more by family processes such as conflict between parents than it is by family structure’ (Bewaeys et al., 1997; Parks, 1998; Fitzgerald, 1999; Patterson and Chan, 1999; Clarke, 2000 Anderssen et al., 2002 and Golombok et al., 2003). This proves that it is better for a child’s development for it to be in a happy lesbian-parented family than it is in an unhappy, conflicting nuclear one. However, some people would argue that although this maybe true, the child would still lack having a male role model. But what most people don’t realize is that although both parents are female, most children still have regular contact with important men in their life, such as godfathers, grandfathers and uncles etc. These people also play an important part in the child’s socialization.

One part of the article is headed Being a child in a lesbian-parented family. It puts across a really poignant message to people that feel these children don’t have a normal life. Dempsey (2004) interviewed a 5-year-old girl who has lesbian parents. She knew she had been conceived through an unknown sperm donor. On her first day at school her new headmaster asked her about her father, she told him that she didn’t have one, just a donor. At this he argued with her and insisted that she must have a father, he was so closed to the ways of family diversity that he tried to suppress her knowledge with his own ideals of what a family “should” be. Ray and Gregory (2001) interviewed a group of children aged between 5 and 8 years old. They reported that many of the children they interviewed held firm on the simple fact that they have two mothers, despite curious and persistent questioning from their peers. The children were asked how they would define a family. They answered that a family was having two loving parents, they did not say having a mother and a father.

It seems to me that the only thing making lesbian families to be wrong are people with out dated ideals on how the family should be rather than caring whether it is really good for the child.

If you are interested in reading more on this topic a quick search on IBSS for articles relating to ‘lesbian*’ and ‘family’ pulls up 325 results. A search for ‘same-sex*’ yields 1,450 results while a narrowed search for ‘same-sex relationships’ comes up with 260 results. IBSS has an extensive number of indexed articles that focus on same-sex relationships and issues facing the gay community in today’s society across the globe.