Same-Sex Parent Families and Children's Academic Achievement

Children in traditional families (i.e., married, 2 biological parents) tend to do better than their peers in nontraditional families. An exception to this pattern appears to be children from same-sex parent families. Children with lesbian mothers or gay fathers do not exhibit the poorer outcomes typically associated with nontraditional families. Studies of same-sex parent families, however, have relied on a static conceptualization of the family and discounted the importance of the timing and number of family transitions for understanding children's outcomes. To examine whether samesex parent families represent an exception among nontraditional families, the author used data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study—Kindergarten cohort (N = 19,043) to create a dynamic indicator of children's family structure and tested its association with math assessment scores. The results indicated that children in same-sex parent families scored lower than their peers in married, 2-biological parent households, but the difference was nonsignificant net of family transitions.