Not so fast: That Australian study on gay parenting tells us almost nothing useful
“Kids from same-sex families fare as well as peers – or better” claims the heading of an article by an Australian academic repeated in the New York Times , Washington Post , the Guardian and many other media outlets this week. Children with same-sex attracted parents are “doing well in terms of their overall health”, their “families are getting along really well”, says Simon Crouch. Actually, they are doing “better” than average on those points, but they do “experience stigma”, which explains any “lower scores” on certain measures. So we have to get rid of that stigma somehow… It’s a familiar story, and if this one seems particularly deja vu it is because we heard it all a year ago, when interim results from the Australian Study of Child Health in Same-Sex Families (ACHESS) were published with similar upbeat headlines. Dr Crouch, himself an openly homosexual man with twin boys aged about 5, and his University of Melbourne team, couldn’t wait to tell the good news to a p