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from Parenting & Family
A Boy, His Two Mothers,
And Psychosexual Development
August 18, 2004 - A California clinical psychologist is urging mental
health professionals to begin developing new therapies to aid children who are
brought up in gay households.
Toni Vaughn Heineman, DMH, put forth her theories in Psychoanalytic Psychology
(2004, Vol. 21, No. 1, 99-115). She stressed that children of gay parents
should not be compared to those of heterosexual parents in a way that implies
that heterosexuality is the norm.
According to Heineman, "Children of gay and lesbian parents must be offered
theories of healthy development that include them." She observes that Freudian
theories of sexual development were based upon the heterosexual family as the
norm, and that "homophobia" has been institutionalized within psychoanalysis.
In addition, she believes that the internalized, anti-homosexual attitudes of
the gay parents themselves have "contributed to our lack of theoretical
attention to the psychosexual development of children living and growing up in
these families."
The author says research comparing different family structures is
counterproductive.
"Research on the children of gay and lesbian parents that focuses on comparisons
with the children of heterosexual parents, including comparisons with children
of single heterosexual mothers, runs the danger of perpetuating the
hetero-centric assumptions of our current developmental theories."
For Some Children,
Having Three Parents is Normal
In discussing children growing up in gay households, she targets the
developmental challenges of boys who are reared in lesbian homes. She suggests
that a boy in a lesbian household must move from viewing his parents as a dyadic
relationship to a triadic relationship. In this new relationship, the boy not
only has two mothers, but must cope with the reality of an absent father.
Will children in homosexual households become homosexuals themselves? She
writes: "Although most children of homosexual parents identify themselves as
heterosexual, it is not surprising that they report more homosexual
experimentation than the children of heterosexual parents. Lesbian parents may
offer their children a range of identificatory possibilities, at least in the
area of sexual object choice--perhaps wishing for their children to be different
from them, while being open to their being like them, in this regard."
Updated: 8 February 2008
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