Kids Need Opposite-Sex Parents

I've been visiting with in-laws over this New Year's weekend.

A bit of catch-up news finds that a good friend of the family is in the late-second trimester of a surrogate pregnancy. She was hired for $25,000 to bear a baby for a gay couple. One of the men had his sister donate an ovum egg cell, which was then fertilized by his partner (in-vitro) - thus the baby would have the sperm of one of the partners and the family DNA of the other. The total costs for all the fertility medical work was expected to be around $100,000. (I'm hearing this third-hand, so the numbers could be off.) I asked how our family friend is feeling: she's delivered two babies of her own, and the emotions must be intense? Will it be difficult for her to give up the new baby after carrying the little thing for nine months? I didn't even ask about the political morality of all of this: I still think that a child grows up best with a mom and a dad. I'm sure two gay guys can lovingly care for a baby, but it's quite unorthodox, and it just seems kind of wierd, frankly, that the child will have no mother in its life and upbringing.

Anyway, Janice Shaw Crouse has a related piece over at American Thinker, "Girls Need a Dad and Boys Need a Mom":

The latest issue of The Journal of Communication and Religion (November 2008, Volume 31, Number 2) contains an excellent analysis of the importance of opposite-sex parent relationships. The common sense conclusion is backed up with social science data and affirmed by a peer-reviewed scholarly article: girls need a dad, and boys need a mom.

Not surprisingly, the study also found that communication is an essential building block for all family relationships -- family interactions are the crucible for attitudes, values, priorities, and worldviews. Beyond the shaping and modeling of these essential personal characteristics, the family shapes an individual's interpersonal system and self-identity.

Further, stable homes include specific talk about religion and support for children's involvement in religious activities. These families create high-quality relationships by specific communication behaviors, such as openness, assurance, and dependency. Those same characteristics, not incidentally, are powerful predictors for marital success or failure.

The authors, G.L. Forward, Alison Sansom-Livolsi, and Jordanna McGovern, stress the fact that a family is more than merely a group of individuals who live under the same roof. They cite numerous studies indicating that parents play a crucial role in a child's personal and social development. In fact, a child's relationship with his or her parents is the single most important factor in predicting that child's long-term happiness, adjustment, development, educational attainment, and success. Beyond that general information, studies indicate that girls get better support from the family than do boys. Girls feel closer to their parents, perhaps because parents converse with and express emotion more readily with daughters than with sons. In general, mothers spend far more time with daughters than with sons. Likewise, fathers spend more time with sons than with their daughters. Yet, father-daughter and mother-son relationships tend to have greater impact on a child's future intimate relationships than their relationship with the same-sex parent.

There's more at the link.

Related: Michael Medved, "Changing Marriage Itself."