MX reporting - tough love or lesbian love?

Since my wife works in town on Mondays and Tuesdays she brought back a copy of MX from the train today - the cream of Australian reportage.

Following my recent post she drew my attention to some recent research (quoted in MX) that suggests that lesbian couples are better than heterosexual couples in bringing up children.

Interested, I did a quick google search on the organisation that did the research (London's National Academy for Parenting Practitioners) and also the think tank that have picked it up - Demos.

I can't find any reference to this in UK media coverage or indeed on the NAPP or DEMOS websites. Or rather I can find plenty of coverage of the NAPP's report on parenting however all the newspaper coverage in the UK picks up on something else from the report. This is from The Independent on November 8th 2009 (just a week ago):

A generation of liberal parents has striven towards a utopian ideal: raising their children in a non-confrontational household, unfettered by strict rules. But a new study of 9,000 households found that children whose parents favoured this laissez-faire style of parenting were less likely to develop vital life skills – such as empathy, self-control and application – by the age of five than those whose parents took a traditional "tough love" approach.

While the "tough love" approach to parenting – defined as combining warmth with firm rules and clear boundaries – was thought to have gone out of fashion in the 1950s, researchers found that children with this upbringing were a third more likely to have well-developed "soft" skills than those with more relaxed parents.

In a blow to the huge numbers of parents who are divorced or remarried, the study also found that children with married parents were twice as likely to develop good skills as those living with stepfamilies or single parents.

And then later in the same article ...

The Building Character report, produced by the Demos think tank using data collected as part of the Millennium Cohort Study (MCS), found that parenting style is the most important factor in determining child character development, cancelling any differences in development between children from richer and poorer families.

Researchers found that tough-love parenting is less frequent in low-income households, with only 9.8 per cent of the poorest parents subscribing to it. Twelve per cent of parents in the lowest-income quintile were found to be disengaged. "The factors that get in the way of more effective parenting are found more frequently in families living in disadvantaged conditions," said Professor Stephen Scott, director for research for the National Academy for Parenting Practitioners. "These include a stressful lifestyle interrupted by events such as serious physical illness, domestic violence, poor housing and medical disorders such as depression and drug misuse."

Now, it is quite possible that the bit about Lesbian parenting is buried somewhere else in the report and it hasn't hit the headlines yet. Nevertheless it is quite interesting that here in Australia MX decided to pick up on this while ignoring what everyone else thinks is the thrust of the report. This is another example of the survey society we live in. The question is not even which survey do you trust, but can come down to which part of which survey is actually quoted.

As I said MX is the gold standard of reporting down under!?