Know anyone who thinks that the best parents are straight parents? Well, today is the day you get to bust those small-minded bubbles because science has yet again proved that same-sex couples make great parents, too.

This is totally not surprising, but still pretty rad information comes from a recent Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics study.

The researchers embarked on the study to “compensate for the shortcomings of previous studies, which recruited same-sex parent families,” CNN reports.

About the study

Researchers took data from the National Survey of Children’s Health to examine how parents and their children fared, Vox reports.

The researchers came to their conclusion by using the National Survey of Children’s Health on emotional and physical well-being. The research team matched 95 same-sex female parent households to 95 different-sex parents based on these characteristics:

• Parents’ age
• Parents’ level of education
• Whether parents were born in the United States
• Family residence (urban or rural)
• Child’s age
• Child’s race
• Child’s gender
• Whether the child was born in the United States or elsewhere

One interesting aspect the study did discover was that lesbian parents had a higher level of parenting stress because of “perceived homophobia.”

But “although the analysis found that same-sex parents tended to report modestly more parenting stress, it found no difference in outcomes, such as general health and learning behaviors, among the children of opposite-sex and same-sex parents,” Vox reports.

The importance of the research

The goal of this study was to complete a population-based comparison, CNN adds.

“It is the only study to compare same-sex and different-sex parent households with stable, continuously coupled parents and their biological offspring,” Dr. Nanette Gartrell, one of the study’s authors, says. “Parents feel pressured to justify the quality of their parenting more than their heterosexual counterparts. We also suspect and feel that more study is warranted, but the cultural spotlight on same-sex parenting may be part of the stress.”

While this study is amazing, we hope researchers keep looking at this topic because the more research that’s conducted, the more good science can be shoved in the faces of haters.

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Image of same sex parents via Shutterstock

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