USA Today: "Gay Couples: A Close Look At This Modern Family, Parenting"

So many gay couples today have kids that it has become a cultural phenomenon – there’s even a new TV show about a modern family that includes a gay couple with an adopted baby.

One in five male couples and one in three lesbian couples were raising children as of the 2000 Census. That’s way up from 1990, when one in 20 male couples and one in five lesbian couples had kids.

But Census numbers are just part of a new comprehensive analysis of research on gay parenting since the 1970s in new book Lesbian and Gay Parents and Their Children: Research on the Family Life Cycle, by Abbie Goldberg, an assistant professor of psychology at Clark University in Worcester, Mass.

Gay households have more in common than not with their heterosexual counterparts who are also raising kids, the research shows. “The sexual orientation of a parent has really little to do with their parenting,” Goldberg says.

That idea comes through loud and clear in pop culture, in TV shows such as Modern Family, in which two gay men adopt a Vietnamese infant, and among celebrities as gay stars are increasingly having or adopting children.

Demographer Gary Gates of the Williams Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles also has studied same-sex families. His new analysis of the 2008 American Community Survey showed that 31% of same-sex couples who identify themselves as spouses are raising kids compared with 43% of heterosexual couples. That survey marked the first available Census data about same-sex spouses and gay U.S. families. Gates says same-sex couples who identify as married are similar to heterosexual couples in many ways, including the fact that almost one-third are raising children. [READ MORE]