Moms Are Enough

From William J. Bennett to the national conference of Catholic bishops, proponents of traditional morality are alarmed about the state of the American family. According to the census, only 25% of U.S. families are of the “Father Knows Best” variety. With nuclear families a smaller proportion of the population than ever, and with unmarried women leading 7.2% of households and gay families setting up house next door, family life, we are told, is on the verge of being atomized, our children corrupted and our moral codes dissolved into nihilism.

Conservative advocates of “family values” concede that the traditional nuclear family has problems, but they pronounce the presence of a strong male figure to be vital to a child’s development. They cite studies saying that children reared in homes led by women are at a disadvantage because of poverty, have greater risk of involvement in crime, higher levels of teen pregnancy and less achievement at school. Boys, especially, are at risk because they lack a male role model. Without Ward Cleaver coming home from work at 5 p.m., how will sons know how to be men?

One new family form that, as a psychologist, I have come to know well tells us something different. In my study of lesbian couples, sons--and daughters--are thriving. These women-led families have much to teach us about family love, the adaptability of kids and the power of women to raise psychologically healthy sons and daughters entirely on their own.

Thanks to the technological revolution of anonymous-donor insemination, the identity of a founding father may not even be part of the basic proposition of a two-mother family. Even so, sons of lesbians may be more assured of their masculinity than Beaver Cleaver’s grandson down the block.

In my sampling of the more than 1 million lesbian couples who are mothers to sons, I found these women working to honor and encourage their sons’ masculinity. Lesbian couples have given rise to the concept of the “social mother”: the parent who has no genetic connection with the son (daughter) she is raising, and who may or may not have a legal relationship with him, but who has established an emotional, even fatherly (motherly) bond with him (her). Talking about his social mother, 10-year-old Jason says, “It was Nicole who taught me to play basketball. So when I get to play in the NBA, I’ll invite her to the games.”

Mothers like Nicole and her partner Astrid are raising boys who are confident in their maleness. Their sons are able to roll their own role models, as it were, finding men to admire and learn from among their relatives, teachers, coaches, even sports heroes. They and the other boys I studied did express an acute awareness of the process of becoming a boy, a mindfulness that may have contributed to their sense of masculinity. In any case, these boys are not “sissies” or “mama’s boys.” Nor do they compensate for the lack of a father figure by being overly aggressive. Research shows they tend to grow up to be heterosexual in the same proportion as children in the rest of the population.

In most of the lesbian-led families I studied, both mothers had professional careers, but they still spent more time with their children overall than married heterosexual parents did. Children of traditional nuclear families tend to spend more time with hired caregivers. In two-mother families, the parents usually divide parenting tasks more equally, the result being that their children tend to have greater interaction with them than the child with a mom and a dad.

It takes strong women to build a family from scratch. From coming out as lesbians to deciding to have children, they have proved themselves willing to go against the flow and create their own structures with few models to emulate.

Certainly, many families headed by women suffer huge disadvantages. Yet, studies that lump all single mothers into a uniform group ignore the fact that non-married mothers significantly differ in their socioeconomic challenges and opportunities. Researchers--and moralists--are derelict in failing to note the successes of single-mother families. A just-released report from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development found that the recent drop in the national poverty rate, and the improvement in the well-being of children, was sharp in black families and in households headed by women. Thanks to the strong economy in the 1990s, children living with single mothers showed the most improvement.

If the American family is truly in crisis, lesbian parents and their sons offer us the opportunity to rethink and reshape our community of caring--and put the mother at the heart of it. Indeed, they are calling on us to enlarge the possibilities of love.