Adolescent : behavior and development

xv, 494 p.; 24 cm

Children: Behavior and development

+hlm.;c

Instructor's manual for adolescents behavior and development

v+135hlm.;23c

Adolescents: behavior and development

xiv+hlm.;23c

Children behavior and development

xiii+5626hlm.;23c

Parent-child relationships and sexual identity in male and female homosexuals and heterosexuals.

This article includes two studies of reported parent-child relations and sexual iden-tity: one of a population of 84 white, well-educated female homosexuals and their 94 matched heterosexual controls and the other of a group of 127 similarly well-educated, white male homosexuals and their 123 heterosexual matched controls. Female homosexuals reported having had more negative relations with their fathers in childhood that female heterosexuals, although a wide variety of parent-daughter relations was reported by both groups. The female homosexuals were neither mother nor father identified, but they were more distant from both parents and other people than their controls. The female homosexuals also reported a more masculine child-hood than the heterosexuals, and they were more masculine on an objective measure of masculinity-femininity. Compared with their controls, the male homosexuals reported more close-binding, intimate mothers and hostile, detached fathers than the heterosexual controls. As with the two female groups, a wide variety of parent-son relations was reported. Homosexual males were not more mother identified than their controls, but, like the female group, they were more distant from parents and other people than the matched controls. Male homosexuals reported more feminine childhoods, and they were less masculine than controls on a masculinity-femininity test. Considerable attention has been focused on the psychological factors involved in homo-sexuality. Today, most students in the area realize that a homosexual adjustment has exceptionally complex determining compo-nents, but they agree that one profitable approach is the study of the relationship between parents and the prehomosexual child, especially as this affects the child's sex-role identification. Few research workers have studied female homosexuality. Thus, little is known about parent-child interactions among prehomo-sexual females and the relations of these interactions with later sexual identity; and the little research that has been conducted is inconsistent in its results