Effects of adoption and homoparental breeding

Efectos de Adopción Y Crianza Homoparental

The adoption and upbringing of children by parents of the same sex is a subject recently discussed in Colombia, even though it has been investigated for more than four decades in the rest of the world. There are concerns that growing up in this kind of family produces adverse effects. This document aims to respond through a review of the literature if there are differences between biological children or children adopted by homosexual parents in psychological adjustment, development of sexuality, stigmatization and cognitive performance. Through the search in the PubMed database, 204 articles were found in total, 18 articles were selected that fulfilled the inclusion criteria, which include approximately 1700 children with different types of families. In conclusion, the quality of the studies does not allow to generate degrees of recommendation for answering whether the welfare of these children is equal, better or worse than the children raised by heterosexual parents. However, a certain tendency and consistency among the studies shows that there is no difference in the psychological well-being or the development of sexuality between these two groups of families. In contrast, there is a greater possibility of stigmatization, a variable that does not depend itself on the conformation of the family or the sexual orientation of the parents, but depends on external factors such as the social and educational environment of the child and his peers.