On the Attribution of Parental Competence: Parents’ Behavior Matters, not Their Sexual Orientation

Abstract

Using a vignette approach, two studies examined the impact of three factors on judgments of parental competence: target parents’ sexual orientation, gender, and parenting behavior. According to the aversive prejudice framework, people should express their subtle prejudice against lesbian and gay parents when the latter show detrimental parenting behavior––that is, when devaluation is easy to rationalize. Samples of 170 and 290 German heterosexual participants each were presented with a parent-child conflict situation. In Study 1, the child threw a public tantrum during a restaurant visit; in Study 2, the children wanted to play outside instead of doing their homework. Irrespective of target gender, lesbian and gay parents were judged as equally or even somewhat more competent than heterosexual parents. In both studies, parents who responded in an authoritative way received the most positive evaluation of parental competence, whereas parents who responded in an authoritarian way received the most negative evaluation. In neither study, however, there was a significant interaction between parents’ sexual orientation and parenting behavior. That is, contrary to hypothesis, lesbian and gay parents did not receive more negative evaluation than heterosexual parents when responding in a comparatively negative, authoritarian or permissive way. Such interaction could also not be found when additionally considering participants’ levels of homonegativity or social desirability. The discussion centers on the increasing acceptance of same-sex parenthood as well as the high appreciation of authoritative parenting in contemporary Germany.

Gender Role Beliefs and Ontologization of Mothers: A Moderated Mediation Analysis

“…A full ontologization process was not observed and the expected dehumanization of the lesbian stepmother target was not observed. These results are in line with previous studies showing that lesbian stepfamilies and same-sex parents did not receive a more negative evaluation than heterosexual parents (e.g., Claxton-Oldfield and O'Neil 2007;Kranz 2022). However, results also showed that perceptions of competence were higher for a depicted heterosexual biological mother than for the two types of stepmothers (heterosexual and lesbian stepmothers), confirming previous studies' results (Di Battista et al 2022).…”

“…Future research into the ontologization process should also include other relevant targets in the vignette scenarios, such as lesbian biological mothers. While the present study has aimed to explore attitudes of heterosexual people, future studies will need to investigate attitudes and experiences of heterosexual and lesbian biological mothers and stepmothers, including measures of intensive mothering, perceptions of family functioning, and well-being (Di Battista et al 2021, 2022Salvati and Koc 2022). Following the assumptions of a system justification theory (Jost 2018;Jost and Banaji 1994), intensive mothering operates to persuade women that they want (or should want) to commit themselves in practices that are detrimental for mental health and family functioning (Verniers et al 2022).…”