The Gay Baby Boom: The Psychology of Gay Parenthood

9. Life within Gay and Lesbian Families

[9] Life within Gay and Lesbian Families Who Does What? aising children and maintaining a household are neverending tasks. Research on heterosexual parents has found that the manner in which couples share these responsibilities influences how satisfied they are with their relationship , and this in turn influences their parenting (see Chapter 1 for a fuller discussion of these issues). Heterosexual parents tend to fall back on traditional gender roles once they have children, with the mother assuming the role of the primary nurturer and caretaker for the children. Even when both parents are employed and both desire a more equal parenting arrangement, heterosexual mothers still take on most of the responsibilities at home (Hochschild, 1989). Among gay or lesbian couples, there is no automatic gender -related assumption that one partner will have most of the responsibility for running the household and taking care of the children. Couples made up of two women or two men may elect to fall back upon a traditional division of labor, with one partner assuming the traditional “masculine” role 149 R and the other the traditional “feminine” role, or they may decide to divide tasks more equitably, according to interests and abilities. Some research has shown that, in general, gay and lesbian couples are more egalitarian in their division of labor (Blumstein & Schwartz, 1983; Kurdek, 1993). For heterosexual couples, however, the time when roles become most gender specific is once they have children (Cowan & Cowan, 1992). Do gay and lesbian couples, once they become parents, tend to show a traditional division of labor, or do they maintain their relatively egalitarian division? Previous studies suggest that, most of the time, they maintain their egalitarian approach . Compared with heterosexual parents, for example, lesbian parents show more equal participation in parenting. Lesbian nonbiological mothers have been found to be more involved in the daily responsibilities of childcare than heterosexual fathers (Tasker & Golombok, 1998). Sullivan (1996) found that the majority of lesbian couples with children in her study (twenty-nine out of thirty-four) apportioned their employment , childcare, and household work in an egalitarian manner. Patterson (1995a) also found, in her examination of twenty-nine families, that lesbian couples generally divide tasks in a fairly egalitarian manner; however, in primary lesbian families, the biological mother tends to do more of the childcare. We were interested in examining the pattern of dividing tasks in our sample of parents. We asked those parents who are currently in a relationship to rate their division of labor in two areas: their housekeeping tasks and their child-rearing responsibilities. Agreement between partners was very strong, with both partners seeming to view things the same way. (See Table 9.1.) These Life within Gay and Lesbian Families / 150 correlations are comparable to those found in studies of heterosexual couples with children (see Deal, Hagan, and Anderson, 1992, for example). This suggests that gay and lesbian parents, like heterosexual parents, agree with each others’ estimations about how much of the workload each one carries. Overall, very few couples reported that one partner took on all or most of the responsibilities associated with maintaining a household or taking care of children. In fact, the parents in this study generally describe a very egalitarian arrangement . Fifty percent of the respondents answered the question about who does the bulk of the childcare with a score of “4”, meaning “We share equally”; 49 percent gave that response to the question about household tasks. As a group, these parents report an evenly balanced picture of family life, with both parents taking on a roughly similar amount of responsibility (see Table 9.2). Life within Gay and Lesbian Families / 151 table 9.1 Interpartner Agreement on Division of Labor Housekeeping Child Rearing Women Primary lesbian .68*** .67*** Lesbian stepfamilies .70*** .56*** Men Primary gay .74*** .80*** note: There were too few male couples whose children had been conceived in a prior heterosexual relationship to include in the analyses. *** ≤ .001 Even within families where the workload is fairly evenly divided , there can still be differences between partners. Other research on lesbian couples (Patterson, 1995a) has found that, among families where the child had been born into the lesbian relationship, biological mothers tend to do more of the child-rearing tasks than do nonbiological mothers. This difference existed among Patterson’s subjects even though the partners’ division of the workload was relatively even. We were interested in seeing whether the same pattern would...