Rainbow families: what research shows about the children

A sandpit, Saturday morning. A five-year-old is building a castle and asks the girl next to him in passing: “Where’s your dad?” The girl does not look up from her spade. “I’ve got two mums. The one in the red cardigan is Mummy, and the one with the coffee is Mama Nina.” The boy thinks about it. “Oh. Can I have the bucket?” And that is that.

On the bench beside them sit two adults who heard the exchange and held their breath. The children settled the matter in ten seconds. We adults often carry it for much longer — in the form of questions we sometimes do not dare to say aloud: is the child missing something? Will school be hard for them? Will they grow up differently?

These are fair questions and they deserve a fair answer. In this post I summarise what four decades of research show about children in rainbow families — families in which at least one parent is lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender — where the research runs out, and what parents, grandparents and everyone else close to the child can do.

What rainbow families are

The term covers very different stories. In some families the child was born in one parent’s earlier, different-sex relationship, and that parent now lives with a same-sex partner. In others, two women or two men decided to have a child together. Some children are adopted or fostered, some were conceived with donated eggs or sperm, and some have more than two adults who care for them by agreement.

These paths are not the same, and each brings its own questions. A child who has lived through their parents’ separation has a separation behind them — whoever the parent lives with now. A child conceived with a donor will one day ask about their origins; I wrote about that in Donor conception: what it means for a child’s identity. So when we read the research, it is worth knowing which families it is talking about. Legal arrangements differ between countries and change over time; I do not write about them here, because that is not my field.

Four decades of research

The first studies grew out of a very practical need. In the 1970s, courts in several countries were removing custody from lesbian mothers after divorce on the grounds that the child would be harmed. Nobody had tested the claim. In 1983 the British psychologist Susan Golombok and her colleagues published one of the first comparisons of children growing up with lesbian mothers and children of single heterosexual mothers. They did not find the differences in emotional and behavioural development that the courts had assumed.

A great deal of work has accumulated since. The American psychologist Charlotte Patterson published the first extensive review of the research in 1992 and has updated it several times. In 1986 a longitudinal study began in the United States that has followed lesbian-mother families from pregnancy onwards — the children in it are adults today. One difficulty with the early studies was that parents volunteered for them. That is why the study published in 2004 by Jennifer Wainright, Stephen Russell and Charlotte Patterson mattered: from a large national sample of American secondary-school pupils they selected 44 adolescents living with same-sex parents and compared them with 44 peers with different-sex parents. They found no significant differences in psychological wellbeing, school outcomes or relationships.

The conclusion that Patterson and Golombok repeat in their reviews is consistent: children of same-sex parents develop comparably to their peers.

More recent studies have also included families that were almost absent from samples in the first decades. In 2014 Golombok and her colleagues, in the United Kingdom, compared adoptive families with two fathers, two mothers and different-sex couples. The children of gay fathers were adjusting just as well as the others, and parent–child relationships in these families were warm and involved.

What a child actually needs

If the make-up of a family does not predict how a child will do — what does? In 2012 the developmental psychologist Michael Lamb summarised decades of research on very different families and reached a conclusion that is almost dull in its consistency. A child’s adjustment is predicted by the quality of the relationship between child and parents, the quality of the relationship between the adults who care for them, and the circumstances the family lives in — money, stability, support from those around them. The parents’ gender and sexual orientation are not among those factors.

This fits with what we know about attachment. A child does not attach to a role but to a person: the one who comes when they cry, who knows how to soothe them, and who is still there tomorrow. Whoever does that reliably becomes the child’s secure base, whether the child calls them Mummy, Daddy, Papa or Mama Nina. I described how this pattern is built and handed on in Attachment and parenting: how the pattern passes to a child.

The study by Wainright and colleagues showed exactly this as well: adolescents did better when they had a close relationship with their parents — and that held equally in both groups of families.

Stigma: the factor the family does not create

It would be dishonest to say there are no differences anywhere. One appears consistently, but it does not come from the family; it comes from the surroundings. In 2010 Henny Bos and Nanette Gartrell found, among seventeen-year-olds in the American longitudinal study, that adolescents who had experienced teasing, exclusion or contemptuous remarks because of their family reported more behavioural problems than those who had not.

The same study also showed what protects: a good relationship with their mothers considerably softened the effect of stigma. Related studies also mention, as protective factors, contact with other children from similar families and a school where different kinds of family are talked about openly.

This is a pattern we know from elsewhere. The burden does not arise from what a person is but from how those around them look at it; more on this in Minority stress: the load those around you do not see. For children in rainbow families this means something very concrete: the most important thing relatives, teachers and neighbours can do for them is not special attention but ordinariness.

Three common worries

“A child needs a mother and a father.” A child needs adults who are attuned to them, and it does them good to have people of different genders and temperaments in their life. Most children in rainbow families do: grandparents, aunts, uncles, godparents, nursery staff, coaches. Research does not show that a role model of a particular gender has to be a parent.

“Will this make the child gay or lesbian too?” The question itself assumes that would be a bad thing, which is not the case. The answer from research, though, is that the great majority of children of same-sex parents grow up to be heterosexual adults, just like the great majority of children in general. What they may take from home is the sense that they would be allowed to say so if it were otherwise.

“They’ll be teased at school.” Some will, others will not. Children are teased for their glasses, surname, weight, accent and poverty, and we do not conclude from this that people with glasses should not have children. The question is not whether a child will ever meet an unpleasant remark, but whether they will have someone at home they can tell, and an adult at school who will act.

How to talk to a child about their family

Children who know the story of their family from the start do not experience it as a revelation but as a fact. So the same applies as with adoption or donor conception: early, simply and more than once. For a three-year-old one sentence is enough: “Families are different. You have two daddies.” A schoolchild will want to know how they came into the world. A teenager will want to know why some people turn their noses up at it.

It also matters that a child is given words they can use themselves — and permission not to use them. They are not obliged to explain to every classmate how their family came about. A short example (constructed; this is not a real person):

“Mummy, Tine said I can’t have two mums. That one of them must be an aunt.”
“Hm. How did you feel when he said that?”
“I was cross. And a bit ashamed.”
“I understand. Tine probably hasn’t met a family like ours yet. What would you like to say to him if he asks again?”
“That I’ve got two mums and that’s just how it is.”
“That’s a good sentence. And if you don’t want to say anything, that’s fine too. Would you like me to talk to your teacher about it?”

In this conversation the mother does not correct Tine or explain society. She asks about the feeling first, takes the shame seriously, and gives her daughter back some strength: a sentence that is hers. I wrote about why the first step with shame is for someone to hear it in Shame: the emotion that whispers “There is something wrong with me”.

Exercise: the story of our family

The two parents can do this exercise on their own, or together with the child if they are old enough. Set aside half an hour.

1. Write the story in five sentences. How your family came to be, in a way a five-year-old can understand. No apologising and no hiding. If you get stuck on a sentence, that is a sign the two of you have not yet talked enough about that part.
2. Agree on names. What the child calls each of you and how they introduce you to others. Let the child take part; a name they chose themselves will be easier to say in the playground.
3. Prepare three answers. One for a curious child, one for an awkward adult, and one for someone who wants to wound. The last can be very short: “I’m not going to talk about that.”
4. List the child’s people. Everyone in their circle: grandparents, godparents, family friends, other families like yours. The map of your support network can help. Where the circle is thin, think about whom you could invite closer.
5. Choose one step for this month. A conversation with the nursery teacher, a book about different families on the shelf, a visit to a family where the child will see they are not the only one.

The exercise is not meant to prepare the child for a fight. It is meant to make sure nothing is left at home that may not be talked about.

What everyone else can do

Grandparents, aunts, nursery staff, teachers and neighbours have more power over stigma than they think. A few small things that do a lot:

• Use the names the child uses. If they say “my daddies”, do not correct it to “Daddy and his friend”.
• Do not ask the child what you ought to ask the parents — and do not ask the parents what you would not ask any other couple.
• At school and nursery: a form that says “parent 1, parent 2”, or a draw-your-family task with no prescribed number of mums, tells a child there is room for them.
• When you hear a remark, respond. A child does not remember every insult. They do remember whether one of the adults stayed silent.

Grandparents have a special place. Many a rainbow parent first had to travel the road to being accepted by their own family; I write about that in Coming out to your family as an adult: when you tell them who you are. When a grandchild arrives, that road often opens once more — and surprisingly often it is the grandchildren who soften the grandparents.

Where the research runs out

So far I have written as though the picture were clean. It is not entirely, and it is right to say so.

First, the samples. Many studies are small, the parents volunteered for them, they are often better educated than average and live in Western cities. We know most about families with two mothers, less about families with two fathers, and very little about families with a transgender parent or families in less welcoming settings. “No differences” therefore means “in the families we studied, we found no differences” — which is a great deal, but not everything.

Second, there are studies with different conclusions. The best known is the sociologist Mark Regnerus’s study from 2012, which reported poorer outcomes for adults whose parent had at some point had a same-sex relationship. It drew sharp methodological criticism: most of those adults had not grown up with a same-sex couple at all but had lived through the break-up of their family of origin, so the study was in effect comparing stable and unstable families. When Simon Cheng and Brian Powell re-analysed the same data in 2015, most of the differences disappeared.

Third, and this seems to me the most important: “comparable” does not mean “without problems”. Rainbow families argue, separate, burn out and make mistakes like all others. A child of two mothers who are separating needs what every child needs when parents separate. If we turned the research into a demand that these families must be exemplary because “everyone is watching”, we would be placing a burden on the parents that sooner or later passes to the child. And the reverse: when a child from a rainbow family is struggling, the reason often has nothing to do with the make-up of the family. It needs to be looked for where you would look with any child.

When to seek help

The reasons are much the same as in any family: a child withdraws, refuses school, sleeps badly, or the adults can no longer agree on how to go on. Further reasons may be tied to stigma — a child who starts hiding their family, a parent worn out by constant caution, or a relationship with grandparents that became strained again when the child was born.

When looking for help, you have the right to ask a therapist how they view families like yours before you begin. A good professional will not feel attacked by the question. In Ljubljana there is the organisation Legebitra, which offers counselling and support and can point you further.

I am a marriage and family therapist in training under supervision; sessions take place in person in Ljubljana, and I also work with English-speaking clients. I do not work individually with children and adolescents, but the family can come together, or the parents as a couple. It often turns out that the question “is our child all right” is really carrying another question: are the two of us enough. To that question the research answers fairly clearly — what decides it is how you are with your child, not who you are.

What to remember

• Four decades of research, summarised by Charlotte Patterson and Susan Golombok, show that children of same-sex parents develop comparably to their peers.
• A child’s wellbeing is decided by the quality of relationships and the circumstances the family lives in — not by the parents’ gender or sexual orientation.
• The difference that does show is stigma. It comes from the surroundings, and a good relationship with parents, an open school and contact with similar families protect against it.
• It helps a child to know the story of their family early and to have their own words for it — and permission not to explain it to everyone.
• The research has limits, and “comparable” does not mean “without problems”. A rainbow family does not have to be exemplary to be good enough.