LGBTQ Parents and Their Children During the Family Life Cycle

Over the past few decades the number of children growing up in LGBTQ-parent families has increased dramatically within the context of shifting sociopolitical and legal climates around the world, more favorable attitudes toward diverse family forms, and expanded access to assisted reproduction technology and adoption (Goldberg et al., 2018). Among diverse LGBTQ-parent family forms, lesbian and gay stepfamily arrangements formed post heterosexual relationship (PHR) dissolution likely represent the most common formation (Tasker and Lavender-Stott, 2020). Contrary to prevailing expectations, early studies with mothers who came out as lesbians showed that they were just as likely to have good mental health and positive relationships with their children as were heterosexual mothers, and that their children were no more likely to show emotional and behavioral difficulties, poor performance at school, or atypical gender role behavior than were children with heterosexual parents (Tasker, 2010; Patterson, 2017).

Along with research on lesbian stepfamily arrangements, what we currently know about parenting and the adjustment of children whose parents are a sexual and/or a gender minority is still mainly limited to lesbian-parent families through donor insemination (Bos and Gartrell, 2020). Planned lesbian-parent families were also created by adoption (Farr et al., 2020), by sexual intercourse with a man who would not be a father to the child and by elective co-parenting, whereby the mother had a child with a man who was not her partner but played a role in raising the child (Jadva et al., 2015). The rapid increase in openly lesbian women having children at that time became known as “the lesbian baby boom” (Patterson, 2017).

Studies with lesbian-parent families formed through donor insemination confirmed the positive outcomes found for lesbian stepfamily arrangements. In addition, studies increasingly supplemented a between-difference approach (in which planned lesbian-parent families with donor-conceived offspring were compared with heterosexual-parent families) with a within-difference approach, thus shedding light on the nuanced family dynamics and unique family processes specific to lesbian parents and their donor-conceived offspring (e.g., relationships with donors, parenting with different biological relationships to the child) (Gato, 2016; Bos and Gartrell, 2020). For instance, crucial insights have been generated by the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS), the first study to have examined the experiences and outcomes of donor-conceived offspring and their lesbian parents from conception to mid-adulthood (Gartrell, 2021), emphasizing both the adverse effect of stigmatization on child development over time (Bos et al., 2021) and the absence of difference in psychological adjustment among offspring with an anonymous, a known, or an open-identity donor (Bos and Gartrell, 2011; Carone et al., 2021).

In the last two decades, some longitudinal studies have been conducted with adoptive lesbian- and gay-parent families (e.g., Goldberg and Garcia, 2016; Farr, 2017; McConnachie et al., 2020), confirming that the quality of family processes and the stigmatization occuring in the outside world are more relevant to child adjustment than family structure. Also preliminary cross-sectional evidence is now available on the family life dynamics and the positive adjustment of children born to surrogacy and raised in a two-father (e.g., Carone et al., 2018b, 2020b; Golombok et al., 2018; Green et al., 2019; Berkowitz, 2020) or a gay single father (Carone et al., 2020a) family, as well as on the challenges faced and unique strengths among school-age children, adolescents, and emerging adults raised in sexual minority-parent families (Kuvalanka and Goldberg, 2009; Tasker and Granville, 2011; Gartrell et al., 2012; Kuvalanka et al., 2014; Farr et al., 2016a; Koh et al., 2020). Increasingly, there is also a growing interest in studying the experiences and outcomes of bisexual mothers (Tasker and Delvoye, 2015), and transgender or non-binary parents (Kuvalanka et al., 2018; Carone et al., 2020c).