Children of same-sex or heterosexual marriages

New research has found “overwhelming consensus” among scientists that children raised by same-sex couples are no worse off than those raised by parents of the opposite sex.

The study looked at 19,000 studies and articles related to same-sex parenting from 1977 to 2013.

“Consensus is overwhelming in terms of there being no difference in children who are raised by same-sex or different-sex parents,” one of the researchers, University of Oregon sociology professor Ryan Light, told Reuters.

To determine if and when scientific consensus had been achieved, Adams systematically examined citation networks to find shifts in content. Studies in the 1980s showed some disagreement among scientists on the outcome of same-sex parenting.

But by 1990, he found a developing consensus among researchers about the effect of same-sex parenting. And by 2000, he discovered that researchers had reached “overwhelming” consensus that there is no difference between same-sex and different-sex parenting in the psychological, behavioural or educational outcomes of children.

“As same-sex marriage has been debated in courts across the country, there has been the lingering question about the effects of same-sex parenting on children. I wanted to analyze the research from the past decades to determine if there was consensus amongst researchers about that effect,” he said.