"What we're saying is there is no best (household) structure," said Stacey, a professor of social and cultural analysis at NYU. "There are better parenting practices, and certainly better relationships and worse relationships, but they don't come in one particular structure."
Many of the studies that highlight gender-specific parenting skills, such as a father's masculine interactions with sons and a mother's nurturing care, only compared heterosexual married couples with divorced or single-parent families. Lesbian- and gay-parented households as well as single
adoptive parents were usually left out.
By not controlling for the number of parents, sexual identity, marital status and biogenetic relationship to the
children, the research often failed to isolate the real impact of gender on effective parenting, according to Biblarz and Stacey's study.
Recent research on lesbian-parented households seems to support the study's gender-neutral thesis. Overall, studies indicate that children raised with lesbian co-parents do just as well as children raised by heterosexual
married couples. The children of lesbian co-parents may even have fewer behavioral problems and higher self-esteem.