What Is Marriage For?

by E. J. Graff

  Nor do stats on children of single mothers—who usually have higher dropout rates and more delinquency—necessarily point to the need for an XY-parent: as one New York Times article observed, “while an absent father might be the reason, so could poverty, or bad schools, or the lack of a family backup system, or something else altogether.” In fact, when researchers control for money and the mother’s age—i.e., if a single mother is no richer or poorer than a mom-and-dad pair, and if she isn’t a teenager or is matched with other teenage moms—they find that a child raised without a dad can turn out just as well.

  Until the 1970s, psychological researchers trying to understand how infants and children developed into successful adults focused almost entirely on mothers and their babies. With the women’s movement, a host of mostly male researchers wanted to overcome that mother-bias and began trying to find out how, exactly, a dad’s effect on a child is different than a mom’s. Their surprised answer: it’s not.

  Which is not to say that fathers make no difference: two involved adults are better for a child than one. When children have mothers and fathers who are both very involved with them, their “separation distress”—that period that all parents dread, when toddlers scream at being left with a stranger—starts later and doesn’t last as long. According to current psychological theory, that’s a good sign that a child trusts his or her emotional bonds. But then, if the children have more than two adults to whom they’re close (aunts, granddads, nannies), “separation distress” comes even later and lasts even less long. Having more “psychological” parents, in other words, is very helpful: the additional adult’s sex or biological relationship is not necessarily what makes the difference.

  Looking further, researchers found that infants did treat their parents differently, but the differences did not divide up by sex: rather, infants treated each parent as an individual, responding to individual temperaments. The Victorian hymns to the irreplace-ability of “Mother,” however politically convenient for keeping her home, were false.

  One common belief is that children need fathers because real men help children develop strict consciences, show boys how to be men, and generally prevent delinquency—or to put it differently, children without fathers grow up to be rampantly destructive ids, stealing and getting pregnant and joining gangs and becoming social nightmares. But when researchers look closely, they find that what makes the difference is not simply having a male parent, but rather how involved and affectionate those fathers are. Which boys behave well? Boys with involved and affectionate fathers. Which boys become delinquents? Boys whose fathers neglect or ridicule them or are distant or travel a lot—especially boys with military fathers. Which boys rate more highly as “masculine” and identify more comfortably as men? Boys with warm and involved relationships with their fathers—even if those fathers are not rated as very “masculine.” Which boys score lower on feeling masculine and make up for it by behaving in more stereotypical (i.e., aggressive) male ways? Boys whose fathers are missing or authoritarian or distant (especially those in the military)—but not boys whose fathers are really absent, i.e., dead. Meanwhile, having an affectionate, involved second parent does more than prevent male delinquency: it helps boys and girls in other ways as well. Which children do better in school, feel more in control of their lives, are more comfortable and confident socially, are more cheerful and take more initiative in school and in their lives? Children whose fathers are more involved—while children whose fathers hold back, or are authoritarian and “controlling,” do worse.

  But if an affectionate father helps, and a nasty or distant father hurts, then researchers still haven’t discovered something essentially male that a child needs: they’ve simply discovered that children do better with closeness and reliability than with ridicule or rejection. Maybe children, especially boys, just do better when they have more than one parent who’s affectionate and involved from birth. Maybe involved fathers are a sign of a happy household, a definite plus for any child. Maybe boys are more likely to obey the cultural model of manhood if they like the guy nearby—and to flout it if he’s nasty. So how do you stop measuring the effects of having a good second parent, or having two stable and happily married parents, and start measuring the effects of having at least one parent who’s male?

  Are moms and dads different? Researchers also try to measure differences in how mothers and fathers—as mothers and fathers—treat their children. The problem here is that what researchers measure is extremely culture-bound, since different groups—even today, within the West—actually hold opposite ideas about what makes a good father. For some, a good father brings home the bacon and holds himself as a distant moral authority, while in others, a good father shares both the financial responsibilities and the day-to-day diapering, listening and playing. (In just the same way, of course, what’s considered “a good man” differs among groups, eras, and cultures.) As a result, differences in how fathers and mothers behave are even smaller and harder to generalize than the differences in their effects on children. For instance, some researchers find that fathers (Western, white, middle-class) talk in more complex language to their daughters, and mothers to their sons; but then other researchers find that mothers pay more attention to their daughters, and fathers to sons. All researchers find that fathers are much more likely than mothers to encourage their children, especially sons, to “play with sex-typed toys”—boys with trucks, girls with dolls—but then, some fathers don’t chastise or hit their sons if they become enamored of, say, sewing. (The result here is that boys with fathers in the house tend to be more gender-stereotypical, and more hostile toward effeminacy, than boys whose fathers are away. Is that a good thing? Is it simply that Western fathers are trying to protect their sons from the hostility and violence they remember being directed at soft boys? Or—given that girls today have vastly more latitude than fathers would have given them a hundred years ago, and certainly more latitude than boys—is it a temporary blip as our culture shifts away from strict gender-roles?) All researchers do find that, as a group, contemporary Western fathers spend less time with their children than do mothers. But of course, since some fathers spend more time with the kids than do some mothers, this doesn’t tell us anything about the elusive father-effect.

  Researchers most consistently agree that Western fathers, besides seeing to it that their sons behave as boys should, spend a higher proportion of their time with the kids playing than do mothers; even if the mothers spend more actual time playing, it’s a smaller proportion of their time together, since mothers also do most of the bathing, dressing, feeding, and so on. And when they do play with the kids, most researchers agree, fathers “tended to provide staccato bursts of both physical and social stimulation, whereas mothers tended to be more rhythmic and containing.” Fathers, in other words, toss their kids up in the air, or growl that they’re coming to get them, or play touch-football, making kids squeal; moms hold and nurse and coo and listen thoughtfully. Some theorists decide that this, then—this thrilling alternation of fear and happiness, this more challenging and demanding play—is how (good) fathers help children become more autonomous, socially skilled, willing to take on challenges, confident, and so on. But is it? While researchers find this difference consistently between American and British dads and moms of various races and ethnicities, they find no such difference between Swedish and Israeli kibbutz dads and moms, who play with the children equally. If that staccato father-play is so distinctive and important, how come the Israeli army is such an impressive fighting force and Swedish society is so harmonious? Once again, researchers might be discovering only that two parents are better than one—not that male and female parents offer something distinctly different. In fact, after offering pages and pages of the most minute data, one father-researcher after another throws up his hands and concludes that he cannot demonstrate specific effects from fathers as fathers, not just as good people.

  The lack of fundamental differences between fathers
and mothers shows up in a most unlikely place: studies of postdivorce custody. Children in father-custody and children in mother-custody turn out equally well on every measure: self-esteem, maturity, independence, anxiety, behavior problems, psychosomatic complaints, and relationships (although teenage girls in father-custody were slightly more at risk for pregnancy—so much for father-discipline). Apparently neither Roman aristocrats, British common law, nor Victorian judges were right in suggesting that fathers/mothers were “naturally” the superior parent.

  You have to read these hundreds of pages of studies to quite believe how thoroughly researchers have tried to measure a difference between moms and dads and how thoroughly they’ve failed to find one. Clearly, it has come as a surprise. “In sum, very little about the gender of the parent seems to be distinctly important,” writes Michael Lamb, the dean of the father-researchers, who sounds like he’s scratching his head as he summarizes the last twenty years’ research. “Fathers and mothers seem to influence their children in similar rather than dissimilar ways. Contrary to the expectations of many psychologists, including myself . . . the differences between mothers and fathers appears much less important than the similarities.” They write it over and over, as if they can’t quite believe it and don’t expect us to. Writes another, Charlie Lewis, “If there are differences between mothers and fathers, these are not easy to measure and do not have demonstrable effects on the child’s development, as was once simply assumed.”

  So what does help kids? Although researchers have to stand on their heads and squint to find any distinctive father-effect, they very easily find a few things that have a powerfully good effect on children. Enough resources (like food, shelter, clothing, healthcare, and schooling) make a big difference. Happily married parents who get along well and feel that chores are shared fairly have a powerful effect on both infants and children (even if the father is not actively involved with the kids, presumably because the mother is more attentive and affectionate when she herself is happy and less stressed). Children need the basics—food, shelter, clothing, healthcare—and they need reliable warmth, affection, and attention. When they get that in double doses, of course they do better— but not in ways that differ dramatically based on which sex gives the second dose. Which, if you want an evolutionary explanation, makes sense: given a world in which either Mom or Dad or both could disappear at any moment—and, until the twentieth century, often did—why would nature overspecialize in who we needed to grow up, so long as we were fed, sheltered, and treated reasonably well?

  So most of the current “children-need-fathers” rhetoric—or at least, the research upon which it draws—can really be translated as “children-need-two-parents-with-enough-resources.” It does not really tell us anything about whether children need one parent of each sex. But maybe dads do offer something unique that simply can’t be teased out so long as both parents live at home, or even if fathers were around only while their offspring were infants. Which is why some researchers have turned to examining lesbian and gay families: to understand whether male and female parents offer something distinct. But before we look at those studies, we have to ask a (perhaps prurient) question: how, exactly, do homosexuals become parents?

  How lesbians and gay men become parents, 1: divorce There have been two waves of research on children who grow up with lesbian or gay male parents. The first wave was conducted in the 1970s and early 1980s, just as the movement for lesbian and gay rights was beginning. These studies were done on children who were begotten the usual way, then came to be the children of lesbians or gay men when their parents divorced and one (or both) found a partner of the same sex. Those children, of course, respond to the new parent as warily, angrily, wearily (or even, if they had a vile ex-parent, hopefully) as to any parental revision. Any anger—and it’s not universal—at Mom or Dad for saying he or she is gay would be difficult to untangle from the anger of having the family roof ripped off, of being exposed to the chill of separation and loss and change. That’s why the researchers who originally studied the children of divorced lesbian or gay parents usually compared them to children of divorced heterosexual parents: if they compared children of divorced lesbians or gay men to children of still-paired heterosexuals, they would be unable to tell whether any differences should be attributed to the divorce or to one parent’s sexual orientation.

  Whether or not you fully accept psychology’s criteria for measuring who we are and who we become (and the professionals themselves debate their system of measurements with a fair amount of heat), their studies uncover only minuscule differences between children of divorce whose parents are heterosexual and those whose parents are lesbian or gay. For instance, one study of one hundred children of divorced lesbian and heterosexual moms found no difference in the sex-typing of their favorite television shows, characters, games, toys—in other words, both groups of boys were more likely to play with balls and guns, both groups of girls played with dolls—and no difference in their sense of themselves as male or female (measured by such tests as whether, when asked to draw a person, a boy draws a boy or a girl draws a girl). Another showed that although daughters of lesbian mothers were more likely to be described as joining in “rough-and-tumble” play—arguably good, allowing girls to learn the famous fairness, hard-work, resilience, and team-player lessons that boys usually get from sports—or as occasionally playing with “masculine” toys like trucks, no differences could be found among their sons. Aside from these results—and the differences were very small—the children looked the same in terms of gender identity, sex role behavior, and the whole gamut of psychology’s measures of well-being, from rates of psychological disturbances to moral judgment, “locus of control,” intelligence test results, social relationships, and popularity. A more recently published longitudinal study, methodologically superior to those done earlier, traced children of divorced lesbian and divorced heterosexual British mothers from age ten into young adulthood: this study found no differences in mental health, education, or employment.

  Perhaps the most scrutinized results are on sexual orientation: do gay parents turn out gay kids? So far, the answer appears to be no, although commentators argue over how to interpret the scant evidence. The proportion of divorced gay people’s now-adult offspring who call themselves gay (or whose parents say they think the kids are gay) wavers from study to study. In one study of thirty-six adolescents between thirteen and nineteen, half of whose mothers were lesbian and half heterosexual, one daughter (no sons) of the heterosexual mothers identified as gay; none of the lesbians’ kids were gay. In another study, two out of nineteen adolescents with gay fathers called themselves gay. In the more recent and methodologically superior study, two of twenty-five adult children of lesbian mothers considered themselves lesbian, gay, or bisexual, while none of the twenty adult offspring with heterosexual mothers did.

  What can such tiny numbers mean? Some doomsayers have insisted that the numbers from that last study meant that having a lesbian mom increases the “risk” of being gay astronomically: two out of twenty-five is many more than zero out of twenty, especially when contrasted to the conservative estimate that roughly 2 to 3 percent of us are gay. But can you really make meaningful predictions about sexual orientation from two out of forty-five kids? If so, you might conclude from the earlier study that daughters of heterosexual mothers, not daughters of lesbian moms, have a higher “risk” of being gay themselves. Or maybe you’d conclude that when gay parents’ offspring are also gay themselves, they’re more willing to be contacted by researchers than are the gay offspring of straight parents. Or you might conclude that gay parents’ influence is biological, not environmental, since during the youngsters’ formative years their parents were modeling heterosexuality by living with spouses of the other sex. Or perhaps, among youngsters who grow up in gay homes, a few are more willing to be open to all their possibilities, free of shame—which is, to some minds, not a bad thing. Or maybe you’d decide that, if that’s the
best gay parents can do at “recruiting” their kids—to use that old slander—they’re doing a pretty lousy job. Or you might decide that, whatever the influence, the huge majority of everyone’s kids tend to fall in love with someone of the other sex: does it really matter if there’s a two- or four-point difference either way? Or perhaps you’d decide, sensibly, that nature, nurture, and culture cannot be teased apart in such tiny studies—if, in fact, those threads will ever be teased apart at all.