Same-Sex Parents Are Rocking This Parent Thing

What are your thoughts on this study?

Kids with two moms may be getting more quality time with their parents — 40 percent more time, in fact, than children with a mom and a dad, according to a new study out of the University of Texas at Austin Population Research Center.

“Leading up to the Supreme Court decision on marriage equality, some of the public dialogue had focused on whether same-sex parents create a different parenting environment for children compared to children who live with a mother and father,” Kate Prickett, postdoctoral fellow and lead study author, tells Yahoo Parenting. “Our study sought to directly test this by looking at the parenting behaviors of a nationally representative, randomly selected sample of parents — something no other studies had examined.”

What the study found was this: Same-sex parents who are female spend 40 percent more time engaged in child-focused activities than do different-sex parents.

“This finding challenges biases against same-sex parents and demonstrates high levels of investment in children by same-sex couples,” Prickett writes for the U.K.-founded Child and Family Blog this week. (Though the study findings were quietly published online in the journal Demography in June, the article has been generating a fresh wave of press coverage, particularly in Britain, this week.)

In the blog post, Prickett explains what sort of activities the study looked at. “By child-focused activities, we mean time spent engaged with children in activities that support their physical and cognitive development, such as reading to them, playing with them, helping with homework, bathing them, and taking them to the doctor,” she writes. “It also includes time parents spent in teacher-parent meetings and taking children to extracurricular activities. It did not include activities such as watching television with children or doing housework while a child was around.”

You can read more on Yahoo News. When you're finished, leave a comment and share your take on it.