Après avoir passé 20 ans à étudier les effets de la structure familiale sur les enfants, les professeurs McLanahan et Sandefur de l'Université du Wisconsin concluent, dans leur ouvrage très exhaustif intitulé « Growing up With a Single Parent: What are the Costs? », que, si on leur demandait de concevoir à partir de zéro un système pour veiller à ce qu'on réponde bien aux besoins fondamentaux d'un enfant, ils proposeraient l'idéal du couple parental hétérosexuel.
After spending 20 years researching the effects of family structure on children, University of Wisconsin professors McLanahan and Sandefur concluded in their very exhaustive work, entitled “Growing Up with a Single Parent: What are the Costs?”, that if they were asked to design a system for making sure that a child's basic needs were met, if they could draw it up from scratch and design it from a blank slate, so to speak, they would come up with the heterosexual two-parent ideal.
