Same-sex parents devote more time to their kids, study suggests

A new University of Texas study has indicated what we’ve known all along: There’s no reason to discriminate against same-sex parents – especially as it turns out they spend more time engaging their kids in developmental activities.

According to time-diary surveys from 2003 to 2013, same-sex parents devoted 40 percent more “focused” time to their children than heterosexual parents, in activities that supported the kids’ development, such as reading to them and helping them with schoolwork.

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Women in both straight and gay relationships spent around 100 minutes per day engaged in child-focused activities, while men who were married to or cohabiting with women averaged 50 minutes per day.

Similar to the moms, same-sex dads set aside about 100 minutes a day for child-focused activities.

Kate Prickett, lead author and postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Texas’s Population Research Center, noted that the study sample only included 55 parents in same-sex relationships out of 44,000 parents surveyed, so the findings “should be interpreted with caution”, but they were “derived from nationally representative data”.

Prickett said, “Our findings show that parental investment in children is at least as high – and possibly higher – among same-sex couples as among different-sex couples. Our study suggests that, on measures of child-focused time, children with two parents of the same sex actually seem to receive more time investment.”

The University of California’s Williams Institute estimated in 2013 that nearly 220,000 American children under the age of 18 were being raised by a same-sex couple, and around 6 million American children and adults had LGBT parents.

“With growing social and legal approval, that number may grow, or at least such families may become more visible, helping researchers to obtain more information about same-sex-headed households,” historian Nathaniel Frank, who frequently writes about LGBT equality, told the Boston Globe.

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