The Need for a Father
I’ve always felt there was something suspect about the argument that a child would be damaged without a man as a parent (or alternatively a woman as a parent) mostly because I couldn’t see what advantage having an explicitly male role model would have over having good role models and in part because it seemed awfully convenient that the ‘facts’ showed that gay couples having families is bad because they’re inherently damaging the child. I’m always relieved when my opposition to things I feel shouldn’t be true can actually be supported by Real Science.
IVF requires a huge degree of financial and physical commitment. You cannot accidentally get pregnant, have the baby, and let it take its chances, as heterosexual couples do all the time. Duncan Smith claims that, without fathers, boys join gangs and teenage girls become pregnant. But “there’s nothing magical about fathers,” says Susan Golombok, professor of family research and director of the Centre for Family Research at the University of Cambridge, and co-author of Growing Up in a Lesbian Family. “Fathers who are very involved with their children are good for children. But fathers who are not very involved - they aren’t as important, and can even have a negative effect. It’s a very simplistic notion to think that fathers are important just because they’re male.”
Don’t boys need male role models? “The thing is that fathers make absolutely no difference to their children’s development of masculinity or femininity,” she says. “Studies that have looked at single-parent families have not found that boys are less masculine or girls less feminine. In fact, it seems that parents make very little difference to the masculinity or femininity of their sons and daughters. The peer group is more important, and the stereotypes that are around them in their day-to-day life. Even in families where parents try hard to influence their children’s gender developent, where they try to stop their sons being very masculine, for example, and try to make them more gender-neutral, actually find that whatever they do makes no difference whatsoever. Fathers are important more in terms of emotional wellbeing, not in terms of role models.”
As for the lesbian issue, says Golombok, “There’s now been more than 30 years of research in Europe and the US, that has found very consistently that children raised in a lesbian household are no different from children in heterosexual families, both in terms of their psychological adjustment, and also in terms of their gender development, and in terms of their relationships with other children.
Another win for my irrational gut positions then, It’s possible I’ve learned entirely the wrong lesson from this.
