Children of same-sex parents do better at school, study claims

Children from same-sex families outperformed their peers in the Netherlands

Credit: Reuters 

Children with same-sex parents do better at school than those whose fathers and mothers are in heterosexual relationships, a new study has found. 

Homosexual parents tend to be wealthier, better educated and have a higher socioeconomic status, which explains their children’s better performance, researchers at Belgium’s Leuven University said. 

The economic and education specialists said that even if the social status of  gay parents was discounted, their children still did slightly better than those from more traditional families. 

The three economists, Deni Mazrekaj, Kristof De Witte and Sofie Cabus, said that same-sex parents spent more time with their children. They were also more interested in their education.  

They suggested that this was because homosexual couples had to overcome more financial and legal barriers to become parents than heterosexual ones. 

Same-sex couples often have to use expensive fertility treatments to have a child, which means they are often wealthy and highly-motivated parents. 

The researchers followed the education of 3,000 Dutch children with same-sex parents from birth to the end of primary school, the Brussels Times reported. They continued tracking about 1,000 pupils through secondary school.

The study focused on the Netherlands because same-sex marriage and adoption have been legal there since 2001, which means there was more data for the study. 

“Given the similarities between Belgium and the Netherlands, we suspect that these findings also apply to Belgium,” Mr De Witte said.

The researchers studied data from about 1.2 million children born between 1998 and 2007.  2,971 children lived with same-sex parents; 2,786 children had two mothers, and 185 children two fathers.

Of the 2,971 children, 1,390 had a biological parent within the same-sex family and 50 children were adopted. The remaining 1,531 of the children became part of a same-sex family after a parent found a new partner of the same sex after a divorce.