A new study out of the Netherlands has revealed that children who are being raised by same-sex families are actually outperforming their peers who are being raised by heterosexual families in primary and secondary school.
The study, which was conducted by researchers Deni Mazrekaj, Kristof de Witte and Sofie Cabus, from KU Leuven University, used government data that tracked all children born in the Netherlands since 1995.
The Netherlands which was the first nation in the world to introduce full marriage equality in 2001 and has generally long been accepting of same-sex couples, and means that researches have more data available to conduct such studies.
The study compared a total of 1,200 kids who were raised by same-sex families with more than 1 million children that were raised by different-sex couples.
The researchers found that children raised by same-sex couples had higher scores in elementary and secondary school and were about 6.7 percent more likely to graduate than children from opposite-sex couples.
“The results indicate that children raised by same-sex couples perform better than children raised by opposite-sex couples in both primary and secondary education,” the researchers said.
The researches explained that the difference could come down to a number of factors including financial stability of same-sex couples, and also because same-sex parents may feel that their children could experience stigma and discrimination, “they may channel this as motivation to increase their parental investment.”
The researchers added that they undertook the study because “a central component of the public policy debates about marriage and family matters is the wellbeing of children in nontraditional family structures.”
