Ideal Families and Social Science Ideals

The fundamental conviction that children need both a mother and a father in the home dominates bipartisan family discourse and influences weighty social policy in the United States. What's more, proponents of this view, including some social scientists, assert social science legitimacy for this claim. The preamble to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act (Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104- 193, 1 10 Stat. 2105, 1996) asserts just that. The Federal Marriage Initiative that diverts money from welfare to promoting heterosexual marriage rests on this premise. On these grounds, the New York Court of Appeals rejected a suit for same-sex marriage (Hernandez v. Robles, 2006), proponents of Proposition 8 convinced California voters to overturn their state supreme court's ruling in favor of same-sex marriage (McKinley & Goodstein, 2008), and the state of Florida successfully defended its ban on gay adoption rights (Lofton v. Kearney, 2005). Some family court judges still deny child custody to divorced lesbian parents on these grounds. Although such family values are generally identified with the Republican Party and the Bush administration, former President Clinton signed the welfare bill and the Defense of Marriage Act, and President Obama has repeated similar claims and statistics about children's needs for fathers and has continued many Bush-era marriage promotion policies. The social science research that is routinely cited, however, does not actually speak to the question of whether or not children need both a mother and a father at home. Instead, proponents generally cite research that compares such families with single parents, thus conflating the number with the gender of parents. At the same time, recurrent claims about the risks of fatherlessness routinely ignore research on same-gender parents that actually can speak directly to the issue. This state of affairs was the launch pad for our article. Much more than hoping to revive an academic debate about the significance of fathers for their children's welfare, as commentator Strohschein believes, or deciding to conduct another review of research on the effects of lesbian parenthood, as Tasker seems to have constmed our project, we set out to ask, ' 'What is the best that social science research can do with the question posed in the public domain, rather than as a nuanced social scientist might wish to frame it, of whether or not the mother-andfather family is best for children?' ' As one of us has discussed elsewhere (Stacey, 1997, 2004b), and although we certainly wish it were otherwise, courts and policymakers overwhelmingly consider only positivist, quantitative research evidence to qualify as true social science. And so we set out to determine how close existing family research ofthat sort can come to addressing whether children need both a mother and father in the home. Although we largely agree with Goldberg that gender and sexual orientation are ultimately inextricable, we attempted to review all of the studies we could locate that mitigated the widespread error of conflating family structure variables that are extricable. Unlike prior reviews of the research on lesbian and gay parenthood (e.g., Patterson, 2000; Stacey & Biblarz 2001; Tasker, 2005) or the vast literature that discusses the effects of marriage, divorce, and single parenthood on children (e.g., McLanahan & Sandefur, 1994; Waite & Gallagher, 2000), we examined two distinct bodies of research that hold the number of parents constant - one that compares gay and straight coparenting couples, the other that compares female and male single parents. Limiting our project in this way allowed us to identify only a few provocative findings that go beyond the stereotype that women, on average, are more involved with children than men, but nothing to support the predominant view that the ideal gender mix of parents is a man and a woman. …