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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'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's exposure to intimate partner violence (IPV) between caregivers is prospectively associated with elevated internalizing and externalizing problems and other adjustment difficulties; the association is robust across many studies and strengthens over time, but it is modest in magnitude, varies widely across children, and operates substantially through co-occurring maltreatment, impaired caregiving, and maternal mental health rather than as a uniform, direct effect of witnessing alone.
Delayed disclosure is the norm in child sexual abuse: most victims do not tell during childhood or delay for months to years, with predictable barriers (young age, intrafamilial abuse, lack of caregiver support), so delay by itself is not evidence of fabrication; how often disclosed cases involve subsequent denial or recantation is genuinely contested, with recantation estimates ranging from uncommon to roughly 23% in dependency samples — where recantation tracks family pressure rather than false allegation.
Maternal (and more broadly parental) depression is a well-replicated risk factor for children's emotional, behavioral, and cognitive difficulties; the average associations are small, are strongest when the depression is severe and chronic, extend from infancy into adolescence, and diminish when the parent's depression is effectively treated.
Structured forensic-interview protocols built on open-ended prompts — canonically the NICHD Investigative Interview Protocol — reliably improve child interviews: interviewers use several times more free-recall invitations and far fewer suggestive and option-posing questions, children provide more (and more central) information, and ground-truth studies show the added information comes at no cost to accuracy.
Young children's reports can be substantially distorted by suggestive, leading, or coercive interviewing, creating a real risk of false accounts; at the same time, children are not inherently unreliable — with developmentally appropriate, non-leading, supportive protocols they can give accurate accounts — so reliability turns on interview quality and conditions, not age alone.
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.
Custody and divorce mediation, compared with litigation, settles disputes faster and with higher party satisfaction and durable improvements in nonresidential-parent involvement and coparenting — benefits visible up to 12 years later in a randomized trial — without increasing conflict; however, benefits are not symmetric across parents and, in high-conflict or intimate-partner-violence cases, mediation requires safety protocols and shows no clear advantage over litigation.
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.
Parental corporal punishment (spanking) is associated with more child aggression, behavior problems, and other adverse outcomes — never with developmental benefit — across meta-analyses, 69 prospective studies, quasi-experimental matching designs, and 92 countries; average effects are modest and the causal magnitude, though not the direction, is debated.
Positive, engaged father (or father-figure) involvement is associated with better child social, emotional, behavioral, cognitive, and academic outcomes; the benefit tracks the quality of positive engagement and the father-child relationship, not the sheer quantity of contact or financial support, and the associations are small in magnitude and substantially confounded by selection.
Children in joint physical custody (living roughly 35% or more of the time with each parent) tend to show equal or better behavioral, emotional, academic, and relational outcomes than children in sole physical custody, and outcomes similar to children in intact families; but the evidence is observational and subject to selection, so joint custody is not established as beneficial for every family — particularly under severe ongoing conflict or family violence.
Involved (non-custodial) grandparents are associated with modestly better grandchild adjustment — fewer emotional and behavioral problems and more prosocial behavior — with the protective association strongest in single-parent, divorced, or high-adversity families; the evidence is correlational and confounded, effects are small, and custodial grandparent care shows the opposite association, driven by the adversity that necessitated it.
The relationship between young children's screen media use and development depends far more on content, context, and co-use than on screen time alone: background and non-educational TV are associated with weaker language and cognition, while educational programming, co-viewing, and later onset are associated with neutral or positive outcomes; raw "screen time" is a weak and inconsistent predictor, and most evidence is correlational.
A small, methodologically limited body of research suggests that post-separation relocation that increases a child's distance from a parent is, on average, associated with somewhat worse adjustment; the evidence is thin, largely retrospective or cross-sectional, confounded by conflict and selection, and the field's own experts conclude it supports no presumption either for or against relocation.
Whether frequent overnight separations from a primary caregiver affect attachment security and adjustment in infants and toddlers is genuinely contested: some studies link frequent overnights to greater attachment insecurity and dysregulation in the youngest children, but the effects are small, inconsistent, and better explained by parental conflict and caregiving quality than by overnights themselves — so the science supports neither a blanket pro- nor anti-overnight presumption.