According to a study published in the July 2010 issue of Pediatrics, teenage boys and girls raised by two-mother lesbian partners show no evidence of adverse consequences from having grown up in a nonconventional family framework. Indeed, they demonstrate fully normal, healthy, and age appropriate psychological adjustment.

The researchers found that the 78 seventeen year old children followed by the US National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study had higher than normal social, academic and generalized competencies, and lower than normal social problems, rule breaking, aggressive and/or externalizing behavior than age matched counterparts.

It is important to note that the number of participants in this study is relatively small, and that the women who elected to participate in it are a self selected group who responded to recruitment ads in newspapers in large metropolitan areas (Boston, Washington and San Francisco) between the years 1986-1992.

However, it is difficult to ignore these findings in the context of the very heated and ongoing argument over whether or not to permit same sex marriage. Many of those who oppose same sex marriage invoke the potential risk to the psychological well being of children raised in same sex families as reason to prohibit it, or the adoption of children by same sex couples. Hopefully this study will weaken the opposition to what remains a blatant and shameful vestige of discrimination.