Senior Project

Abstract

As the years have progressed, there are an increasing number of children who have same-sex parents, and homosexuality is increasingly visible in children's lives in general. Although homosexuality is more and more present in children's lives, there is still hardly any research on how children view this topic. Parents and others need to understand the views their children have in order to raise accepting children. The present study investigates children's attitudes toward same-sex and other-sex families. We examine whether (1) children prefer friends with other-sex parents over friends with same-sex parents, (2) how this preference develops across early childhood, and (3) whether this preference is related to children's "essentialist" ideas about sexuality as inborn vs. chosen. Children were asked to view a series of slides that included a heterosexual and homosexual family and were asked to choose who they would rather play with. After this, children were asked a series of questions to determine essentialist views of sexual orientation. Results found that as children got older, the more homophobia was presented. Parents' predictions of their children's homophobia were significantly higher than 4. It was also found that parents did have accurate ideas of their children's homophobic attitudes.