So much for gay parents being responsible for the decline of civilization. In reality, they are the ones helping with the homework. They are the ones taking their kids to cultural events, and apparently not just ballet, figure skating, and softball.
Adoptive Parents May Try Harder
Washington Post, February 13, 2007; Page A14
Adoptive parents invest more time and financial resources in their children than do biological parents, according to a national study challenging earlier research that has been used to oppose same-sex marriage and gay adoption.The study, reported in the American Sociological Review, found that couples who adopt spend more money on their children and invest more time on such activities as reading to them, eating together and talking with them about their problems.
"One of the reasons adoptive parents invest more is that they really want children, and they go to extraordinary means to have them," Indiana University sociologist Brian Powell, one of the study's three co-authors, said yesterday.
Powell and his colleagues examined data from 13,000 households with first-graders in the family, focusing on 161 families headed by two adoptive parents. They rated better overall than families with biological parents on an array of criteria -- including helping with homework, parental involvement in school, exposure to cultural activities and family attendance at religious services. The only category in which adoptive parents fared worse was the frequency of talking with parents of other children.
Supreme Court justice's daughter accused of DUIFebruary 14, 2007
WHEATON -- A daughter of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was arrested Monday night in Wheaton and charged with driving under the influence of alcohol and child endangerment, Wheaton Deputy Police Chief Thomas Meloni said.
Ann S. Banaszewski, 45, of Wheaton was stopped about 7:25 p.m. in a 1996 Ford Econoline van near Gamon Road and Longfellow Drive after a citizen reported a possible drunken driver was at the McDonald's restaurant near there, Meloni said.
Three of Banaszewski's "small children" were in the van with her at the time, leading to the child endangerment charge, Meloni said. He would not disclose their ages.***
What parent would you rather have?
I think it was Richard Mellon Scaife's father Alan who said he never met a rich man's kid who wasn't a worthless deadbeat.
A growing body of scientific literature demonstrates that children who grow up with 1 or 2 gay and/or lesbian parents fare as well in emotional, cognitive, social, and sexual functioning as do children whose parents are heterosexual. Children's optimal development seems to be influenced more by the nature of the relationships and interactions within the family unit than by the particular structural form it takes.
This conclusion was reached in a study printed in Pediatrics, which is the journal of the AMERICAN ACADEMY OF PEDIATRICS. Beware of imitations. The religious nut cakes fund all sorts of organizations that publish.
[clicking on link gets you to abstract summary -- click on internal link there for full report]
You really have to question the study when you see these passages ....
"Unfortunately,
our data do not unambiguously allow
us to distinguish nonrelative and relative adoptions
(e.g., grandparents adopting their grandchildren)."
and
"As we use multiple imputations for missing
values in the control variables,".
and
"Despite the increase in gay and lesbian couples
and single parents who are adopting, the number of
these families in most nationally representative
datasets is still too small to support statistical analysis".
and
"Our findings indicate that social scientists
still have much to learn about how family structure
advantages or disadvantages children."
Interesting work, but the conclusions are pretty soft.
Considering there's no money for studies thanks to the homophobic noise machine, this is the beginning of good info. When studies are conducted, they always start out too small to be generalized. That's why studies have to be repeated. That's how universites get money for bigger studies.
The conclusions for this study do seem to apply to gay and straight adoptive families. As someone who went through most of the adoptive merry-go-round, I can tell you it takes a much bigger committment than looking for baby daddy volunteers.
In academia, the new findings contradict claims by evolutionary psychologists that parents are born to dote on their biological children more than their adoptive children.
"It really calls into question that people's motivations are really about just passing on their own genes," Powell said.
Here is the abstract from the Journal:
Contemporary legal and scholarly debates emphasize the importance of biological parents for children's well-being. Scholarship in this vein often relies on stepparent families even though adoptive families provide an ideal opportunity to explore the role of biology in family life. In this study, we compare two-adoptive-parent families with other families on one key characteristic-parental investment. Using data from the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study, Kindergarten-First Grade Waves (ECLS-K), basic group comparisons reveal an adoptive advantage over all family types. This advantage is due in part to the socioeconomic differences between adoptive and other families. Once we control for these factors, two-adoptive-parent families invest at similar levels as two-biological-parent families but still at significantly higher levels in most resources than other types of families. These findings are inconsistent with the expectations of sociological family structure explanations, which highlight barriers to parental investment in nontraditional families, and evolutionary science's kin selection theory, which maintains that parents are genetically predisposed to invest in biological children. Instead, these patterns suggest that adoptive parents enrich their children's lives to compensate for the lack of biological ties and the extra challenges of adoption.
Look, basically it's saying adoptive parents buy more books for their kids. That's all.
Considering they both have to work to pay the $20k-$50k per kid and up, just for adoption expenses, most bills non-deductible and not covered by insurance, it takes an even greater effort to find time. I'm not taking about "having" to work so each kid can have his own room, or "having" to work to obtain the personal satisfaction an individual needs to be their best parent at home the rest of the time. I'm taking about having to work to get the money to adopt the kid in the first place, and worrying about their own room, and new books, and college tuition in addition to that.
And one must keep in mind that for many children who are adopted, the alternative is an institution (our daughter at 17 months had been kept in a crib -- she could not even sit up when we got her); a series of foster homes; or an abusive family.
The past president of Adoption Attorneys and Families for Private Adoption is a local guy who gives classes in private adoption. Since the government lists are closed in the DC area and almost everywhere (regardless of age or ethnicity of the child), private adoption is the only way left to go.
I wonder if anyone has looked at the divorce rate among parents who have adopted. I bet it's low.
As my mommy done tole me, all 3 of us kids were unintended.
Compare all those unintended pregnancies out there with parents who spend a few years focusing on adopting a child.
Zoologists have known for many years that homosexuality isn't uncommon among animals. (My own cat has raised suspicions ever since he tried to mount a cowering male dachshund.) But I was surprised to learn recently that male sheep exhibit homosexuality at least as often as humans: roughly 8% of rams turn out to have sex exclusively with other rams.
In other words, there was all kinds of stuff going on at Brokeback Moutain, not just between Jack and Ennis. Ha.
I count 472 species - mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, reptiles, insects - listed there. Amazing how all these animals decided to make the same "lifestyle choice" that human homosexuals supposedly make. Uhhhhhhhhhhh....
Why are we always trying to classify things? This is better than that. This party is better than that party. This type is better than that type. We're people, not cars. Let's classify people based on their individual merits rather than generic studies.
That's just my opinion. I plan on being a father sometime in my life, and I'm not going to say that when I am one some adoptive couple would be better than me. Bull. My mother was adopted, my father was not. Both of them turned out fine. It's individual parents that matter, not how the child came to be living with that person.
Adoptive families are what is called "self-selected." They may have more control some aspects of starting a family, and you're right, they go through a "home study" and other hoops to achieve this goal.
You can let the Committee members know it is a worthy bill here.
Membership: Purkey (Chairman), Orrock, Ware, R.L., Welch, Nixon, Byron, Lingamfelter, Cole, O'Bannon, Janis, Hugo, Cline, Frederick, Gear, Johnson, Melvin, Hull, Watts, Hall, Shannon, Lewis, Caputo.
