Differences in Family Structures

 Today, I wanted to write a little bit about the different family structures that exist in our day and age and the effect that they have on the members of those families, specifically the children. There is a really well produced study about these differences that are displayed on http://www.familystructurestudies.com/. This study covers the intact biological family or IBF(father and mother in the home), lesbian parents, gay parents, single parents, adopted children, divorced parents, and step-parent families. There is a long list of different variables that were analyzed and I would like to discuss a few of them and how they differ between the different family structures. My goal is to use this data to express the most effective type of family structure concerning the effects they have on the children.

The results in this study were gathered from young adults concerning the families they grew up in.

The first variable I would like to discuss is the different levels of education between the family structures. The average level of education in the IBF was 3.19 on a scale of 5. There was only one value that was higher and it was the adoptive family at 3.21. These numbers are significantly higher than all other family structures, the lowest of which is lesbian parents at 2.39. It's also important to note that this is one of two cases in the whole study where another family structure scored higher than the IBF.

This leads to the next variable I would like to talk about which is the percent of these children who, when grown, had an affair while married or cohabiting. This is the second case where IBF wasn't the best scoring. In this case, it was the divorced families at 12% with the IBF at 13%. What's really surprising is that the lesbian mother families were at 40%, making that structure the highest percentage for this variable. This is a trend that I observed throughout most of the study; that the lesbian parent families tend to score worse in almost all aspects, concerning the outcomes for the children, then all other family structures.

Next up is the percentage that have had suicidal thoughts recently. In this case, the IBF and single parent families tied at 5%, while the gay father families reported 24%. That seems really crazy to me that almost 1/4th of all children raised with a father in a gay relationship had had suicidal thoughts recent to the study being performed. I can't think of any specific reasons why this would be the case but it sure is scary to see that kind of correlation.

Another statistic is that of these adult children that were currently on public assistance. The IBF reported 10% while almost every other family structure reported over 30%, with the lesbian parent family being the highest at 38%. This statistic is significant to me because it doesn't necessarily call out a specific structure for having extreme negative results, but instead shows the extremely positive results coming from an IBF compared to any other structure that was observed in this study. So far, I'm sure you can see the trend of the IBF being the most efficient and beneficial family structure among those observed.

There were many other variable that were recorded in this study, but for my purposes, those are all that I would like to cover. I encourage all of you to check out the website and look into the other variable. I promise it will open your eyes to the differences between the different family structures. It sure did that for me! I've always heard it didn't matter whether your family was the traditional family or not, but this research has shown me the reality of the situation. This new information has made me curious to look into other studies in order to further ind out how to develop the optimal family, as I am preparing to start a family on my own. I hope I have been able to spark the same interest in all of you.