AMERICA'S NEW FAMILY VALUES: From the San Francisco Chronicle

Brian, a bright and personable third-grader, brought home from school a form that frustrated him: his family tree, complete with empty spaces for mother, father and four spaces for grandparents. Brian's parents are a lesbian couple, his father is an unknown sperm donor. Brian's mothers worked to persuade their son that nothing was wrong with his family -- instead, something was wrong with the school form.

As same-sex parents are getting married, families such as Brian's are transforming our family trees -- and the nation's landscape. Challenging our convictions about gender, sexuality and parenthood, they are providing us all with a new set of family values -- based not around traditional "Father Knows Best" precepts but an adaptable and sturdy code of parenting that transcends gender.

As a research psychologist and a heterosexual, long-married mother, I set out to study a new breed of mothers: lesbian couples raising sons. Could boys prosper through the power of mothers alone? How would these boys develop a moral compass, a positive sense of themselves as male and confident independence without the presence of a father who knows best?

My study, published in the journal Gender & Psychoanalysis in 2002, found that the sons of lesbian couples are thriving. Boys raised in two-mother families are vibrant, courageous individuals, effectively constructing their sense of self amid ordinary family love and extraordinary social change. These boys are articulate and thoughtful and deeply aware of their own emotional lives -- including the pain that comes from discrimination against their families. They exhibit all the usual traits of manliness, including athletic interests and skills. Significantly, they also demonstrate the openness and ease with feelings usually attributed to women.

Traditional family values have been based on the role of the father as breadwinner and model of outward-based adulthood, and the mother as nurturer and cultivator of the more domestic values of intimacy. Even as more mothers work outside the home and fathers become involved with parenting's daily duties, traditional ideas still permeate our families. The values propounded by same-sex parents explode these notions, while maintaining the core canons that foster family bonds.

...Soon the verbs "to mother" as well as "to father" may well be replaced by the verb "to parent."

As the sons of lesbians tell us, boys have an innate ability to become men, a capacity that good parenting by males or females can nurture. They do not need a single male role model in-house to teach them how to hit a ball or become men. Nor do girls need a female on the premises to show them how to be women. ...

The new family values are not just for families such as Brian's. The rest of us can learn much from how same-sex parents succeed in raising their children. Fathers may discover fresh ways in which they can parent their sons effectively and generously. Single mothers, men gaining custody or choosing to father singly or in couples, and opposite-sex married parents, especially those who work from dawn to dusk -- all can take heart that the revised values of parenting result in children full of moral assurance, ambition, confidence and heart.

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