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Supreme Court of the United States · 1984
466 U.S. 429 (1984)
Although the best interests of the child is a substantial state interest, a custody decision may not give effect to private racial bias; the Equal Protection Clause forbids removing a child from a fit parent based on the social stigma of an interracial household.
Later courts cite it without significant positive or negative signal.
Treatment last confirmed July 18, 2026. Case-wide subsequent treatment; human-set. Not specific to any one passage.
On average, children whose parents divorce or separate score modestly lower on psychological adjustment, conduct, academic achievement, and social relationships than children in continuously married families, and face elevated long-run risk of depression and substance use; but effect sizes are small, most children adjust well, and much of the gap is explained by interparental conflict, parenting, income, and pre-existing differences rather than the divorce event itself.
Children's exposure to frequent, hostile, or poorly resolved interparental conflict is associated with increased internalizing and externalizing problems; the risk tracks how conflict is expressed and resolved (destructive/hostile and child-involving versus constructive) rather than the mere fact of disagreement, and operates substantially through children's emotional insecurity and spillover into parenting.
Children raised by same-sex (lesbian or gay) parents do not differ from children of different-sex parents in psychological adjustment, cognitive ability, or social development; what predicts child outcomes is family process — parenting quality, parental well-being, stigma, and support — not parental sexual orientation.
Children in stepfamilies show, on average, somewhat more behavioral and academic difficulties than children in intact two-biological-parent families, but the differences are modest and are driven far more by the quality of the stepparent-child relationship and family process than by stepfamily structure itself; warm, involved stepparent relationships predict better child outcomes.