Abstract

Comparisons of children's perceptions of lesbian mothers to children's perceptions of heterosexual parents are limited. To investigate whether children's descriptions of their parents vary by family type (lesbian versus heterosexual) and biological relatedness, we interviewed 29 Finnish children raised by lesbian mothers or heterosexual parents. Parents also completed surveys about division of childcare responsibilities and six parenting dimensions. We found no systematic differences between the parent types. A clustering of parents based on the descriptions indicated neither family type, parent gender, or biological relatedness systematically explained the variation in children’s descriptions of parents. Implications of our findings are discussed. Contrary to earlier findings, perceptions were similar across parent types, suggesting that perceptions might be shaped primarily by parents’ actual behavior and not by social categories such as gender and relatedness.

摘要

儿童对女同性恋母亲的看法与儿童对异性父母的看法之间的比较是有限的。为了调查儿童对父母的描述是否因家庭类型（女同性恋与异性恋）和亲缘关系而异，我们采访了由女同性恋母亲或异性父母抚养的29名芬兰儿童。父母还完成了有关育儿责任分工和六个育儿维度的调查。我们没有发现父类型之间的系统差异。基于描述的父母聚类表明家庭类型，父母性别或生物学关系均不能系统地解释儿童对父母描述的变化。我们的发现的含义进行了讨论。与先前的发现相反，不同父母类型的看法相似，