'Growing up with two mothers'

Annemik Leclaire, ‘Opgroeien met twee moeders’ [Growing up with two mothers], p24-30, 26 August 2006, Volkskrant Magazine

The ‘pioneering’ children of lesbians relationships have grown up and are now in their t(w)eens. Most of these children were conceived through artificial insemination, either with help from anonymous donors or acquaintances. An important question is how different these children are from other children with ‘normal’ man-woman parents. Here are two reactions from such children.

A 19 year old girl, Djoeke:

”I have always seen my family as a standard family. I have two parents, we have always had a dog and a cat, a corner house with a garden pointing south, and a boy and a girl. The only difference is that I have two mothers instead of a father and a mother. For me that is actually a very small thing. That gender-aspect is not that meaningful. Also not in the practical sense. I’m living in [a rented] room [for students] and my mother can hang [wooden] planks up, drill and carry really very well.”

16 year old boy, Jelmer:

“For me my family is completely normal. I’m used to it. I like it this way. The only thing that is not normal is that others don’t find it normal. […] I played football for eight years, and one of my parents always went along. They were just between the fathers, and those fathers were always pleasant, they didn’t make it difficult. And my mothers could get along with them very well.”

And what about ‘expert’ opinion on how children from heterosexual differ (or don’t differ) from homosexual relationships? At the University of Amsterdam, Dr Henny Bos conducted a research into this. And it appears that children growing up in lesbian relationships tend to receive more love and are more free to develop themselves:

“Between lesbian biological mothers (who carried the child) and the heterosexual women, she found no difference in the experience of parenthood or the way contact with the child is made. But [there is a difference] between the social mothers (the lesbian mothers who do not carry the child in birth) and the heterosexual fathers.

The ‘co-mothers’ felt more need to justify their parenthood, because they did not have any bloodtie with the child, and because they realise that they had put a deviant form of family on the world. Therefore, according to Bos, they do more than their best compared to fathers to be good parents. Also because they have longed for motherhood, and had to travel a difficult path in order to achieve that.

Further they put less emphasis compared to the fathers on traditional ideals of nurturing, such as self-control and conformist behaviour, and they put down less structure and boundaries on the child.

The differences in this study do not show up in the children. In terms of interests, behavious and psychological wellbeing, the offspring of lesbian women did not differ from children from man-woman relations. […]”