Ideal Families and Social Science Ideals

• Published date: 01 February 2010
• Author: Timothy J. Biblarz,Judith Stacey
• Date: 01 February 2010
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1741-3737.2009.00682.x

TIMOTHY J. BIBLARZ University of Southern California

JUDITH STACEY New York University*

Ideal Families and Social Science Ideals

The fundamental conviction that children need

both a mother and a father in the home domi-

nates bipartisan family discourse and inf‌luences

weighty social policy in the United States.

What’s more, proponents of this view, including

some social scientists, assert social science

legitimacy for this claim. The preamble to

the 1996 Welfare Reform Act (Personal

Responsibility and Work Opportunity Recon-

ciliation Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104 – 193, 110

Stat. 2105, 1996) asserts just that. The Federal

Marriage Initiative that diverts money from wel-

fare to promoting heterosexual marriage rests on

this premise. On these grounds, the New York

Court of Appeals rejected a suit for same-sex

marriage (Hernandez v. Robles, 2006), propo-

nents of Proposition 8 convinced California

voters to overturn their state supreme court’s

ruling in favor of same-sex marriage (McKinley

& Goodstein, 2008), and the state of Florida

successfully defended its ban on gay adoption

rights (Lofton v. Kearney, 2005). Some family

court judges still deny child custody to divorced

lesbian parents on these grounds. Although such

family values are generally identif‌ied with the

Republican Party and the Bush administration,

former President Clinton signed the welfare bill

and the Defense of Marriage Act, and President

Obama has repeated similar claims and statis-

tics about children’s needs for fathers and has

Department of Sociology, University of Southern

California, Los Angeles, CA 90089-2539

(biblarz@usc.edu).

*Department of Sociology, New York University, 295

Lafayette St., 4th f‌loor, New York, NY 10012.

continued many Bush-era marriage promotion

policies.

The social science research that is routinely

cited, however, does not actually speak to the

question of whether or not children need both a

mother and a father at home. Instead, proponents

generally cite research that compares such fami-

lies with single parents, thus conf‌lating the num-

ber with the gender of parents. At the same time,

recurrent claims about the risks of fatherlessness

routinely ignore research on same-gender par-

ents that actually can speak directly to the issue.

This state of affairs was the launch pad for

our article. Much more than hoping to revive

an academic debate about the signif‌icance of

fathers for their children’s welfare, as com-

mentator Strohschein believes, or deciding to

conduct another review of research on the effects

of lesbian parenthood, as Tasker seems to have

construed our project, we set out to ask, ‘‘What is

the best that social science research can do with

the question posed in the public domain, rather

than as a nuanced social scientist might wish

to frame it, of whether or not the mother-and-

father family is best for children?’’ As one of us

has discussed elsewhere (Stacey, 1997, 2004b),

and although we certainly wish it were other-

wise, courts and policymakers overwhelmingly

consider only positivist, quantitative research

evidence to qualify as true social science. And

so we set out to determine how close existing

family research of that sort can come to address-

ing whether children need both a mother and

father in the home. Although we largely agree

with Goldberg that gender and sexual orienta-

tion are ultimately inextricable, we attempted

to review all of the studies we could locate

Journal of Marriage and Family 72 (February 2010): 41– 44 41

DOI:10.1111/j.1741-3737.2009.00682.x