Family Diversity and Child Health: Where Do Same‐Sex Couple Families Fit?
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jomf.12437 |
| Date | 01 February 2018 |
| Author | Laura Freeman Cenegy,Rachel Tolbert Kimbro,Justin T. Denney |
| Published date | 01 February 2018 |
L F C Rice University
J T. D Washington State University∗
R T K Rice University∗∗
Family Diversity and Child Health: Where Do
Same-Sex Couple Families Fit?
Increasing family diversity during the past half
century has focused national attention on how
children are faring in nontraditional family
structures. Much of the limited evidence on
children in same-sex couple families suffers
from several shortcomings, including a lack of
representative data. We use the National Health
Interview Survey (2004–2012) and the National
Survey of Children’s Health (2011–2012) to
identify children in different-sex married and
cohabiting families, never and previously mar-
ried single-parent families, and same-sex couple
families. Considering important characteristics
such as the child’s race or ethnicity and adop-
tion status, household socioeconomic standing,
family stability, and parent health, we exam-
ine the relationship between family type and
parent-rated overall child health. The results
suggest that poorer health among children in
same-sex couple as well as different-sex cohab-
iting couple and single-parent families appears
to be largely the product of demographic
Department of Sociology, Rice University, 6100 Main
Street, Houston, TX 77005 (lfcenegy@rice.edu).
∗Department of Sociology, WashingtonState University,
PO Box 644020, Pullman, WA99164.
∗∗Department of Sociology, Rice University,6100 Main
Street, Houston, TX 77005.
Key Words: child health, family structure, health disparities,
LGBTQ, same-sex marriage.
and socioeconomic differences rather than
exposure to nontraditional family forms.
Families with children have become increas-
ingly diverse over the past several decades,
with signicant increases in single parenthood,
multipartner fertility, cohabiting and step-
parent families, and the number of same-sex
couples raising children (Cancian, Meyer, &
Cook, 2011; Goldberg, Gartrell, & Gates, 2014;
McLanahan & Percheski, 2008). Both the diver-
sication of family forms and the increasing
political scrutiny of them (Manning, Fettro, &
Lamidi, 2014) underscore the need to better
understand whether children are faring equally
well across these heterogeneous family struc-
tures. Children’s physical health, in particular,
has been signicantly underrepresented in the
extant literature on family structure and chil-
dren’s outcomes. Among the existing studies
of family structure and children’s health, the
majority have excluded same-sex couple fami-
lies, placed them into an “other” or “unmarried
couple” category, with a few exceptions (see
Bos, Knox, van Rijn-van Gelderen, & Gartrell,
2016; Reczek, Spiker, Liu, & Crosnoe, 2016),
or omitted important comparisons between non-
traditional families, such as single-parent and
same-sex couple families (Reczek et al., 2016).
Consequently, we have a limited understanding
of the extent to which family diversity matters
for child health.
198 Journal of Marriage and Family 80 (February 2018): 198–218
DOI:10.1111/jomf.12437
Family Diversity and Child Health 199
Public debates about nontraditional family
forms have been ongoing, yet same-sex couple
families have received acute political and schol-
arly attention in recent years. The latest urry of
scholarship regarding the well-being of children
in same-sex couple families has been partially
motivated by the Supreme Court’sconsideration
of the Defense of Marriage Act. This small body
of scholarship concluded there was no credible
social science evidence to support the idea
that children in same-sex couple families fare
worse on any outcomes, including academic
performance, cognitive or social development,
psychological health, sexual activity, or sub-
stance abuse (Manning et al., 2014). Around the
same time, a controversial article was published
in Social Science Research (Regnerus, 2012)
that made claims about lower well-being for
children in same-sex couple families. Extensive
backlash resulted within the scholarly com-
munity, largely revolving around the methods
used to adjudicate children who were and were
not in same-sex couple families (adams &
Light, 2015), a problem that has long plagued
studies of children in same-sex couple families
(Schumm, 2012). There are the following three
primary reasons for this: rst, standard surveys
have often not included the kinds of measures
needed to determine same-sex couple families
(i.e., household rosters including gender and the
relationship of everyone in the household to each
other; Allen, 2015); second, few nationally rep-
resentative studies have contained measures that
allow for the identication of same-sex romantic
partners; and, nally, even fewer large national
data sets have had sample sizes sufcient to
create estimates for children in same-sex couple
families, with a few notable exceptions (see Bos
et al., 2016; Reczek et al., 2016; and for reviews
of these issues, see Allen, 2015; Umberson,
Thomeer, Kroeger, Lodge, & Xu, 2015).
Our goals in this article are to address these
methodological and conceptual shortcomings
and to assess whether children’s health status
is similar or different across diverse family
types. We identify children in same-sex couple
families using two nationally representative
data sets and assess child health differences in
terms of parent-rated overall health across mul-
tiple different-sex, same-sex, and single-parent
family types. Our comparisons go beyond
comparing children in same-sex couple families
to children in different-sex married couple
families, which is an important advancement
in light of the evidence that same-sex couple
families are socially and economically diverse.
Vitally, using two data sets also enables us to
examine a more comprehensive set of confound-
ing factors, such as adoption status and whether
children have ever experienced a parental
divorce or separation, which would not be pos-
sible with any single nationally representative
data source.
B
Conceptual Framework
Denitions of family have become more inclu-
sive in recent decades (Cherlin, 2004) as
Americans have been forced to rethink the
meaning of family amid sweeping demographic
family changes. Although the majority of Amer-
ican children still reside with married biological
or stepparents (Vespa, Lewis, & Krieder, 2013),
a large proportion of families with children
now fall outside the “traditional” nuclear family
rubric (Cancian et al., 2011). Within the family
structure literature, the terms traditional or
simple generally denote family units that consist
solely of a married mother and father living
together with their biological children. Other
family congurations have come to be dened
as nontraditional or complex in relation to this
hegemonic standard. Alternative family forms
are understood as nontraditional or complex
families because they deviate from the historical
traditional or simple family paradigm.
Much of the contemporary family scholarship
to date has studied nontraditional or complex
families and their impact on children through the
lens of multipartner fertility, whereby mothers
and fathers have children with more than one
partner. Complex families, specically, earn
their designation as a result of the multiple
parent and sibling relationships these fami-
lies negotiate in terms of time, resources, and
determining who is and is not a member of
the family (Cancian et al., 2011; Cherlin &
Seltzer, 2014). Yet regardless of whether adults
have biological children with multiple partners,
many families manage a number of possible
parent–child relationships involving nonbiologi-
cal (e.g., adoptive), step, or nonresident parents.
Same-sex couple families, similar to other non-
traditional families, may face challenges that
arise from having to navigate parent–child rela-
tionships with nonbiological or nonresidential
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