> I think it is healthy for children to have both a mother and father who is actively present in their lives.
Not sure how literally this was meant (and a lot of the rest of the thread assuming a mother/father) but studies show kids do just as well with two parents of any gender.
Inclusion is as simple as saying "parents" instead of "mother and father." If you'll read my post again you'll see the wording did include those groups. Maybe examine why you have such a violent knee jerk reaction to these groups being mentioned.
My comment was far from "violent" and knee jerk and had nothing to do with the groups in question. It was a parody of the woke virtue signalling that is trying to shame others for every possible perceived slight no matter the rarity of the edge case.
At least 5 percent of the population is not a super rare edge case, and even if it was people who are edge cases still deserve recognition. Nobody was getting shamed either, it was just a consideration. If we had it your way we'd all be perpetually censored from bringing anything up that didn't immediately pertain to 99% of people. When someone says a wheelchair ramp should be built somewhere is your response that they should stop virtue signalling about edge cases and shaming the "normal" people, or is this response reserved for LGBT concerns?
Please cite the studies. It seems at least impossible that babies of a male-male couple could do as well as those where the baby is raised by its biological mother even only because of the advantages of breastfeeding.
Please cite the studies on breastfeeding. Most show very little long term benefit (meaning, excluding upset stomachs in the first year of life and similar).
Such newspaper articles are of limited use because they don't cite the studies they refer to. No one's gonna buy the author's book to verify her statements.
You also have to consider that women are sometimes bullied into breastfeeding even when it's very hard for them and that is the author's main message. Otherwise she still thinks that "breast is best": "Breastfeeding seems to improve digestion in the first year, lowers rashes for infants and is especially important for preterm babies. It also seems likely that it has some impact on reducing ear infections in young children and lowers the risk of breast cancer for the mother."
That was not at all as conclusive as I was expecting, for several reasons:
* it's study not studies
* it refers strictly to educational performance
* it's likely detecting something else entirely: "The researchers found that same-sex parents are often wealthier, older and more educated than the typical different-sex couple. Same-sex couples often have to use expensive fertility treatments to have a child, meaning they are very motivated to become parents and tend to have a high level of wealth. This is likely to be a key reason their children perform well in school, the economists found" [...] "When the economists controlled for income and wealth, there were a much smaller gap between the test scores of children of same-sex parents and children different-sex parents, although children of homosexual couples still had slightly higher scores."
This has turned into a time sink with no upside for me. I've looked at some of the articles you posted which are pretty low quality. They seem more concerned about winning some USA-only political points than discussing the topic in an objective manner.
If you're making the effort of linking to studies that support a specific statement, please link to the actual studies and not opinion articles about them.
In any case, I would not expect kids with same sex parents to do worse in school or have noticeable psychological issues, which is what these studies were looking for - these are pretty heavy issues after all.
But I would expect that they are slightly worse for subtler reasons: maybe they're a bit more prone to infections in the first years because they weren't breast-fed, maybe they're distressed in school because they're being subtly bullied (mentioned in one article, btw) and so on. Remember that the original claim was "they're no worse", not that they're not much worse. I agree that they're probably not much worse, but a male-female couple has thousands and thousands of years of social support and nature on its side. Of course it's going to be in some ways better.
Not sure how literally this was meant (and a lot of the rest of the thread assuming a mother/father) but studies show kids do just as well with two parents of any gender.