Gender, sexual orientation, and parental status in co-parenting: what really counts? Clinical insights from research with lesbian parents

Introduction: The efforts to capture the complexity of family relationships and their influences on family members have led to a variety of assessment strategies, without, however, a multi-method approach. Additionally, research have began to converge on the results that lesbians and gays’ parental experiences and competencies are similar than those of heterosexual couples. Nevertheless, very few studies have changed their epistemological background focusing on the specific sources of strength and resilience among same-sex parent families. Aims of the work: The aim of this work is to study coparenting, family alliance, parental stress and child’s adjustment in families with lesbian parents and to individuate variables that discriminate between functional and dysfunctional family interactions in clinical and non-clinical contexts. Description of the work: We present two contrasted cases between one lesbian couple who sought a clinical consultation for the child’s symptoms and the other who participated in the study voluntarily. The research procedure was multi-method and used both self-report measures and observation. The quality of triadic family interactions was explored with the postnatal Lausanne Trilogue Play, co-parenting was assessed with the Co-parenting Scale-revised and the magnitude of stress in the parent-child system was evaluated with the Parenting Stress Index. Finally, children’s adjustment was evaluated with the Strenghts and Difficulties Questionnaire (parent version). Conclusions: Contrasted cases show the usefulness of integrating research findings into clinically relevant methods because they allow to examine family processes on both a representative and practicing level. Considering simultaneously gender, sexual orientation and parental status, the study of same-sex parents would open new theoretical, methodological and practical perspectives.