Gay Father Families

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The study will explore the early social experiences and development of infants raised from birth by gay fathers inthe UK, France, and The Netherlands. Infants and parents will be observed interacting when the infants are fourmonths old, and the parents will be interviewed at the same time. When the infants are 12 months old, thequality of their attachments to their parents will be assessed using Ainsworth's Strange Situation procedure. Theparental behaviour of these fathers and the quality of the relationships formed between the infants and theirparents will be compared with those of infants being raised by lesbian and heterosexual couples. All infants willbe conceived using reproductive technologies, including donor insemination and surrogacy, to ensurecomparability. In addition, the study will explore the extent to which the quality of infant-parent attachment atone-year is predicted by individual differences in the parents' behaviour and indices of their social circumstanceswhen the infants are four months old. The study will be the first to examine families where children are raised ingay father families from birth. It will allow us to determine whether infants 'need' women to be involved in theirearly care and emotional lives, as many still believe; and whether infants raised not only by two men, but twomen with same-sex orientation, are as likely to develop normally as those raised from birth by heterosexualparents or by two women with same-sex orientation. Sufficiently large samples will be recruited in each countryto allow exploration of the extent to which legal and cultural differences affect parental behaviour and infantadjustment.