These men described three main strategies that they had employed to become fathers. Thus, this study compared women who grew up in intact families with a heterosexual father and women who grew up in families whose parents divorced and whose father subsequently came out as gay.
Bos, H.
After assuming and presenting their parenthood to the world, they faced discrimination from mainstream society and from other gay men. It is possible that support from family becomes even more salient for lesbians and gay men as they start their own families, such that non-support may have particularly deleterious consequences on mental health during the transition to parenthood.
No longitudinal research has examined the role of friend support in sexual minorities' mental health across the transition to adoptive parenthood.
Finally, a Two additional covariances can be estimated in dyadic growth models. Multilevel Models Basic Trajectories of Depressive and Anxious Symptoms First, an unconditional model without predictors was fit for depression.
Fourth, this study did not examine Time skill, such that participants who expected to do high levels 2 post-placement predictors of perceived skill. These studies generally find that moth- more efficacious as parents. To be included in the study, couples had to be adopting their first child and both partners the transition to adoptive parenthood; it includes gay men most to be first-time parents.
Psychology, 56, 97— Indeed, women experience more opportunities to engage in child care, and may receive more positive feedback about their caregiving capacities once they become parents McBride et al. In the trimmed model for anxiety, statistical tests from these trimmed models were highly similar to workplace support, family support, friend support, and love con- those from the models that included the full set of predictors see tinued to be positively related to symptoms at the time of the adoption; the interaction between internalized homophobia and legal climate continued to predict change in symptoms.
In the final set of models, we retained previously significant effects and effects involved in higher-order interactions. Figure 1. Similarly, the anxiety model would not converge with random slopes, so no covariances involving the slope were estimated. In terms of the gay father's own childhood and upbringing, two studies indicated that the vast majority of gay fathers themselves had experienced an enjoyable childhood and adolescence Skeen and Robinson , Gianino described six psychological steps gay men go through in deciding to embark on a journey to gay fatherhood: a abandoning a traditional parent identity, b finding comfort in a gay identity, c recognizing gay father families, d seeking models and mentors, e recognizing the strengths of being a gay father, and f articulating an expanded identity for themselves.
MLM permits examination of the effects of individual and dyad level variables, accounts for the extent of the shared variance, provides accurate standard errors for testing the regression coefficients relating predictors to outcome scores, and accounts for missing data in the outcome.