MAMMA MIA

TIME magazine has an article that lesbian mothers are better at child-rearing than straights.  Ohhhh  kay. Snap.

The story is from published results of the U.S. National Longitudinal Lesbian Family Study (NLLFS).  The study documented 154 women in 84 families.  These women bore children via artificial insemination and the study tracked the development of each child.

"The authors found that children raised by lesbian mothers — whether the mother was partnered or single — scored very similarly to children raised by heterosexual parents on measures of development and social behavior. These findings were expected, the authors said; however, they were surprised to discover that children in lesbian homes scored higher than kids in straight families on some psychological measures of self-esteem and confidence, did better academically and were less likely to have behavioral problems, such as rule-breaking and aggression. 'We simply expected to find no difference in psychological adjustment between adolescents reared in lesbian families and the normative sample of age-matched controls,' says [researcher Nanette] Gartrell. 'I was surprised to find that on some measures we found higher levels of [psychological] competency and lower levels of behavioral problems. It wasn't something I anticipated.' In addition, children in same-sex-parent families whose mothers ended up separating, did as well as children in lesbian families in which the moms stayed together," details TIME.