New study on lesbian parents

Gays and lesbians are always claiming that they can be parents just as well as straights, and now they brag about study that they say finally proves it:

Children of same-sex parents enjoy better levels of health and wellbeing than their peers from traditional family units, new Australian research suggests.

In what they described as the largest study of its type in the world, University of Melbourne researchers surveyed 315 same-sex parents and 500 children about their physical health and social wellbeing.

Lead researcher Doctor Simon Crouch said children raised by same-sex partners scored an average of 6 per cent higher than the general population on measures of general health and family cohesion.

"That's really a measure that looks at how well families get along, and it seems that same-sex-parent families and the children in them are getting along well, and this has positive impacts on child health," Dr Crouch said.

Not really. The study subjects were not childrens, and were not same-sex couples either.

What these LGBT researchers did was to post some queries on the internet asking gays and lesbians how their kids were doing. Most of the respondents said, not surprisingly, that their kids were doing find.

Read the actual study:

Abstract
Background

It has been suggested that children with same-sex attracted parents score well in psychosocial aspects of their health, however questions remain about the impact of stigma on these children. Research to date has focused on lesbian parents and has been limited by small sample sizes. This study aims to describe the physical, mental and social wellbeing of Australian children with same-sex attracted parents, and the impact that stigma has on them.
Methods

A cross-sectional survey, the Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families, was distributed in 2012 to a convenience sample of 390 parents from Australia who self-identified as same-sex attracted and had children aged 0-17 years. Parent-reported, multidimensional measures of child health and wellbeing and the relationship to perceived stigma were measured.

A "convenience sample" means that it was not a scientific sample. The respondents were "self-identified as same-sex attracted", but not necessarily in a same-sex relationship. They could be single, married to someone of the opposite sex, asexual, closeted, or wildly promiscuous. The study is "parent-reported", meaning no one checked what the parents said. There was no meaningful control group for comparing to straight parents.

The study claims to study the "impact of stigma", but it only says this:

Numerous studies have found that when there is perceived stigma, experienced rejection or homophobic bullying, children with same-sex attracted parents are more likely to display problems in their psychosocial development [16-22]. ...

Parents were asked to indicate how often in the past year their family had experienced stigma related to the their same-sex attraction (eg have people gossiped about you and your family, have people excluded you and your family?). ...

For two thirds of children (333, 67%) parents reported perceived stigma on at least one item of the BSS. ...

Whilst children with same-sex attracted parents from our sample demonstrate comparable health to other children across the population, it is clear that they, and their families, are experiencing stigma. Previous work has suggested that stigma and homophobia are related to problem behavior and conduct problems in children with same-sex attracted parents [17,33,18]. Our findings support and strengthen the idea that stigma related to parental sexual orientation is associated with a negative impact on child mental and emotional wellbeing.

I am surprised that only 2/3 have parents reporting gossip. Doesn't anyone gossip about straights?

So it did not really study the impact of stigma.

Here are some other criticism.

Obviously this is a study by a bunch of gay and lesbian researchers who have a political purpose to reduce gay and lesbian stigma. They desperately want to be accepted like straights. Apparently their best argument is to put out a study like this, and hope that people are fooled into thinking that the need to accept gays and lesbians for the well-being of their children.

Of course all the real studies show that kids do best with their natural opposite-sex parents.