LONDON, December 22, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A UK government parenting adviser has publicly stated that lesbians make better parents than heterosexual couples.
“Lesbians make better parents than a man and a woman,” said Professor Stephen Scott, director of research at the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners and the director of the National Adoption and Fostering Team at Maudsley Hospital, during an event hosted by the think-tank Demos, according to a Daily Mail report.
Professor Scott created an uproar earlier this year when the national adoption agency published a pamphlet on adoption that described opponents of homosexual adoption as “retarded homophobes.”
The adoption guide, which the Daily Mail said has since been withdrawn and destroyed, advised prospective adopters, “Children need good parents much more than retarded homophobes need an excuse to whinge, so don’t let your worries about society’s reaction hinder your desire to give a child a loving caring home.”
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A spokeswoman at the Demos event defended Professor Scott’s declaration on lesbian parenting, saying other contributors had pointed out there was a relative dearth of research on the impact and importance of a father’s attachment to a child, according to the Daily Mail report.
However, there is a vast amount of research into the importance of fathers to children.
A massive Swedish study published in the peer-reviewed journal Acta Paediatrica in 2008 stated that active father figures play a key role in reducing behavior problems in boys and psychological problems in young women.
The review looked at 24 papers published between 1987 and 2007, covering 22,300 individual sets of data from 16 studies. Eighteen of the 24 papers also covered the social economic status of the families studied.
The Swedish researchers found that regular positive contact reduces criminal behavior among children in low-income families and enhances cognitive skills like intelligence, reasoning and language development. Children who lived with both a mother and father figure also had less behavioural problems than those who just lived with their mother.
“Long-term benefits included women who had better relationships with partners and a greater sense of mental and physical well-being at the age of 33 if they had a good relationship with their father at 16,” the report stated.
“Our detailed 20-year review shows that overall, children reap positive benefits if they have active and regular engagement with a father figure” said Dr Anna Sarkadi from the Department of Women’s and Children’s Health at Uppsala University, Sweden.
Earlier this month LifeSiteNews reported on a study carried out by the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research at the University of Melbourne which found that adolescent boys who have a father figure in their lives are significantly less likely to engage in subsequent delinquent behavior than are their peers with no father in their lives.
“The sense of security generated by the presence of a male role model in a youth’s life has protective effects for a child, regardless of the degree of interaction between the child and father,” said Professor Deborah Cobb-Clark, Director of the Melbourne Institute and lead author of the study.
“Fathers provide children with male role models and can influence children’s preferences, values and attitudes, while giving them a sense of security and boosting their self-esteem. They also increase the degree of adult supervision at home, which may lead to a direct reduction of delinquent behaviour,” she said.