From Jude: As part of our Heroes Project, I am delighted to introduce Dr. Stephen Erich, Ph.D. and researcher on adoptive families with gay and lesbian parents. Dr. Erich was kind enough to provide us with the latest research in this area. For those of you with more interest, The Journal of Adoption Quarterly has a special issue coming out this winter on gay families and adoption.

First of all, thank you Jude for giving me the opportunity to talk about a social issue that is very important to me. I have been doing research and speaking about adoptive families with gay and lesbian parents since 2002. As, no doubt many of you know, there has been an abundance of research on families with gay and lesbian parents whose children emerged from previous heterosexual relationships or who were planned through donor insemination. The 20+ years of research on these families is uniformly positive and has certainly influenced the emergence of research on adoptive families.

While research regarding lesbian/gay adoptive families is a relatively new phenomenon, there have been important contributions to our knowledge base in the last few years. I have summarized a few of these studies in the following paragraphs. In 2001, Van Voorhis and Wagner (2001) conducted a content analysis of a dozen prominent social work journals covering a 12 year period and reported that there were no articles dealing with lesbian and gay individuals or couples as adoptive or foster parents. Shortly, thereafter, Ryan and Cash (2004) published a study with gay and lesbian parents that included 183 families and found the parents were able to attain high levels of social support despite the presence of institutionalized discrimination throughout society.  In 2007, Ryan re-examined the data from their original study and found these parents had sufficient parenting skills leading the author to conclude that the adopted children in this study were being raised in healthy family environments.

Erich, Leung, Kindle, and Carter (2005) assessed adoptive family functioning, adopted child behavior and support networks in lesbian/gay families and reported that the forty-three adoptive families in their study scored within the normal to high ranges on a measure of family functioning. The results also indicate these families were able to develop effective support networks and that their adopted children’s behaviors were typical of any family. In a subsequent analysis, that compared the previous sample of lesbian/gay adoptive parents to a similar sample of heterosexual adoptive parents, the results included no statistically significant differences in adoptive family functioning, support networks, and adopted child’s behavior (Erich, Leung, & Kindle, 2005). In still another analysis involving the original group of adoptive families with lesbian and gay parents and two other groups of adoptive families, sexual orientation of the adoptive parent was not a significant predictor of the quality of family functioning. However, lesbian/gay parents who adopted older children, did exhibit better family functioning when compared to their heterosexual counterparts (Leung, Erich, & Kanenberg, 2005).  All three of these analyses involved adoptive families with children whose average age was between 6 and 9.

Erich, Kanenberg, Case, Allen, and Bogdanos (2008) rectified this limitation by studying adopted adolescent attachment to their adoptive parents with a sample made up of lesbian/gay and heterosexual adoptive parents and their children. The key finding from this study was that no group differences were found regarding level of adolescent attachment to parents by parent sexual orientation. It is important to note that all research has one or more limitations and the ones mentioned above are no different. However, do not be dismayed by this reality of research with humans, the sheer volume of studies that support the practice of adoption by gay and lesbian parents represents a strong foundation for accepting the viability of this practice. Within the past year or two, several more articles and books have been written that are expected to be published in the near future.  These new publications will document new research and synthesize these findings with existing research-so keep an eye out for it.

The result of this research has likely encouraged a relatively ongoing and positive change in public attitudes, agency practices and policies along with changes in state marriage or civil union laws regarding people with a same sex sexual orientation. For instance, a recent study by Brodzinsky and colleagues found that approximately 60% of adoption agencies in the U.S. are willing to accept applications from gay and lesbian parents or couples. Additionally, a few states have recently decided to legally recognize gay and lesbian couple relationships which ultimately benefit the children of these couples.

All in all, much progress has been made. But more still needs to be done. Much of this research has not been yet been discussed in mainstream media venues which may help more people to reconsider their belief systems.

Stephen “Arch” Erich, Ph.D., LCSW

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