Gay Parenting

[Rhyfelwyr]

A good question. I could perhaps understand that it would be so if the two male (or female as the case may be) parents shared exactly the same characteristics, and if neither brought anything different to the table...but surely this is unlikely in the extreme. This would also appear to imply that children of single parents are inherently worse off, and that is not necessarily the case either.

And yet I think everyone in this thread would accept that single parent families are not ideal. And I'm not up to date on the procedures, but I expect adoption agencies give strong priority to two-parent families, if they even allow single parents to adopt at all.

Just to pick on this specifically, last time you said this I pointed out that studies based on self report find a large difference in favor of women, studies based on physiological response very small measures, and studies of helping behavior find that men help more. Now you're claiming I dismissed your studies (which you only ever referenced in passing) by claiming that they were by people who had an agenda? I did say that there is a bias towards the "interesting" results in publishing, and it's true, but I said a lot more. The main thing is that in studying empathy, you always have to ask how it is measured. Self report is obviously worthless--you don't get an accurate picture of how people are by asking them about something they want to be, and that's even assuming they know in the first place.

But as I said then, something you always do is that you focus too much on what the question and the answers themselves, rather than being more sutble and asking why people give those answers. Remember when this issue came up in that personality test?

Self-perception is very important. Now you will say the studies also found that when measures more objectively, little difference was found in how caring men/women are, yet I'm dubious how much these sort of surveys can assess that sort of thing. Biology does play a big part in our character, and often hormones only kick in after they have been triggered by actual sitations. For example, there was a piece on the BBC recently about how men get an upsurge in typically female hormones when they hold their young child... that would have been missed just filling in a multiple-choice form, and so that studies are biased towards finding cultural and not biological impacts.

It seems unlikely that there is a significant biological difference.

I thought it is commonly accepted that the reason men are significantly more aggressive is due to their testosterone levels. With the opposite being true for women and their oestrogen.

You have a negative opinion of men, huh.

Put it this way... God help my children if my wife is anything like me. I have a lot of aspergers eg 'extreme male brain' characteristics, they need to be balanced out.

And one of the obvious things, which I think I pointed out in the other thread, is that you can't simply say you are measuring an innate difference. The effect sizes have decreased over time just as the differences in IQ scores between whites and blacks have decreased over time...I would think that this, if true, is very culturally based for example:

Hardly surprising, since as I said biological and cultural factors have complemented each other. As the cultural factors have been reduced, so have apparent gender differences. Still, biological factors underpin certain fundamental differences, take for example the language example.

Just consider the changes in child discipline over the last century!

The particulars change but the basic principles remain the same.

So, would you argue that a pair of Lesbians are the ideal parents?


Is it the case, and/or should it be the case, that a child interacts with and is nurtured by only its parents?

Ajax

If you're going to cut the other half of my point off when you quote me, quite possibly.