A Grief Unnamed: A Psychological Glance at the Children of Non-Traditional Civil Unions

A public exchange in late June 2026 between Katy Faust, founder of the children's rights organization Them Before Us, and University of Arizona women's basketball coach Becky Burke drew wide attention after Burke announced she and her female partner were expecting a child. Faust's response catalogued concerns drawn from accounts she had collected from more than 100 adult children raised by same-sex parents: hunger for the absent biological parent, guilt about that hunger, identity questions about biological fathers, and the cultural pressure to suppress all of it. Burke's reply reframed the announcement as an act of representation and visibility for her community. The National Catholic Register's commentary section covered the exchange as an instance of a recurring pattern — advocates change the subject from developmental facts to adult feelings, and the children's interests recede.

The exchange deserves serious attention, not as a culture war skirmish, but because it exposes a genuine empirical and moral question that Catholic anthropology and developmental science have independently been answering for decades. The question is not whether same-sex parents can love their children. Of course they can. The question is whether the married biological mother and father constitutes a positive ideal for child development — one that is not interchangeable with other structures — and whether honesty about that ideal serves children better than cultural silence about it.

What the longitudinal literature shows

Children raised in households with their married biological mother and father show statistically superior outcomes across multiple domains: educational attainment, emotional regulation, rates of anxiety and depression, substance use, and long-term relational stability.[^1] Sara McLanahan's research at Princeton, spanning more than three decades, established that family structure is among the strongest predictors of child psychological vulnerability, independent of income and race.[^1] Her work, along with that of scholars such as Paul Amato, has been replicated across data sets from multiple countries and using multiple methodologies.

The mechanism is not merely socioeconomic. Studies controlling rigorously for income and selection bias find that outcome gaps narrow in some domains but persist in others — particularly in measures related to biological parent absence and identity formation. Children who do not know or cannot access a biological parent report specific forms of grief that are distinct from the grief of parental death: identity ambiguity about their origins, a sense of having been deliberately excluded from a relationship that other children take for granted, and the particular loneliness of living in a culture that calls this arrangement progressive.

Faust's catalogue is not anecdote arranged as data. It is testimony that maps directly onto what McLanahan's longitudinal work predicts: children hunger for both biological parents, and when one is structurally absent, that hunger does not disappear because the remaining adults are loving or because the surrounding culture approves of the arrangement.

The honest reading of this literature is that biological relatedness matters for identity-formation functions, that the presence of both male and female parental figures serves developmental roles that are not interchangeable, and that the married biological family is not merely a cultural preference but the arrangement most ordered to child flourishing. This is what the data shows. Holding it clearly is an act of honesty about children's interests, not a political stance.

The loneliness of the unnamed loss

The specific grief Faust documents — hunger for a biological father, guilt about that hunger, identity questions about a man who is simultaneously genetic origin and stranger — is a structural form of loneliness, and it is worth examining precisely because contemporary culture has largely refused to name it.

Gabor Maté, writing on the developmental roots of attachment disruption, observes that the harm is not always in what happened but in what did not happen: the attuned contact, the recognition, the presence that a child needed and could not receive.[^2] The void, Maté argues, is in the child's perception of being seen and understood — a void that parental love in other forms does not automatically fill. A child can be genuinely loved by two mothers and still carry the specific absence of a father as a real loss. Calling that loss a reasonable cost of adult rights is not neutrality. It is a choice made on the child's behalf, without the child's consent.

This is where Jordan Peterson's observation about family structure carries weight, even from outside the Catholic tradition. Peterson argues that the empirical data supporting the two-biological-parent household is not ambiguous, and that the cultural claim that all family structures are equivalent has no serious empirical foundation.[^3] The pressure to affirm that claim — and the guilt children feel when their own experience contradicts it — is itself a harm.

The Catholic anthropological frame

Catholic anthropology does not arrive at the ideal of married biological parenthood by cultural convention. It arrives there by way of what persons are. The Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person, articulated by Vitz, Nordling, and Titus, grounds human flourishing in the imago Dei — the understanding that each person images a God who is constitutively relational, a communion of persons.[^4] The body is integral to personhood, not incidental to it. Maleness and femaleness are not interchangeable expressions of a generic human template but complementary forms of human personhood ordered toward each other and toward the generation and formation of new persons.

John Paul II's Theology of the Body argues that the body itself is a theology — that the union of husband and wife in marriage images something real about the inner life of God, and that the child born of that union participates in that imaging in a way that no legal or social arrangement can fully replicate. This is not a claim made in ignorance of other family forms. It is a positive account of what the married biological family is for, grounded in an anthropology that takes the body seriously.

The developmental literature on maternal and paternal attachment, on the distinct regulatory roles mothers and fathers play in child development, and on the identity-formation functions of biological relatedness all converge on this same structure — not because developmental scientists are reading Aquinas, but because they are following children through time and documenting what they find. The biological mother and father together constitute something irreducible in human formation. That is what the data shows, and it is what Catholic anthropology has always maintained.

The child's body carries the genetic signature of two biological parents. When one of those parents is deliberately excluded from the child's life by the structure the adults chose, the child does not simply adapt to a new normal. She carries the absence. She wonders about the man on the street. She feels guilty for wondering. She suppresses the grief because her community has decided the grief is inconvenient. This is not an argument against loving gay parents. It is an argument that the ideal — a married biological mother and father — is empirically identifiable as the ideal because it eliminates this specific, documentable harm.

Holding the ideal honestly

None of this renders any child's outcome deterministic, and nothing here is an assessment of parental love. Children navigate adverse circumstances and find flourishing. Protective factors — at least one stable attuned adult relationship, community belonging, a meaning-giving narrative framework — substantially buffer children from structural risk. The Catholic pastoral tradition, at its best, supplies these with unusual density: in the parish, in sacramental life, in a devotional tradition that names suffering rather than suppressing it.

But the existence of resilience does not make the injury disappear. A child who breaks a leg and heals well still maintains the signs and effects of a broken leg. Children in complex family circumstances deserve accompaniment and care. They also deserve adults who are honest about what the developmental ideal is and why it exists — not to condemn their circumstances, but to take their interests seriously.

What Faust asked, when she listed the predictable experiences of the child Burke was expecting, was a straightforward question: are we willing to look honestly at what this child will likely carry? Burke's response was to change the subject to adult representation. The National Catholic Register noted the pattern because it is a pattern: when the conversation turns to children's developmental interests, advocates for redefining parenthood redirect to adult rights and adult feelings. The children, whose interests were supposed to be served by this redefinition, recede from view.

The Catholic tradition has the anthropological resources to hold the ideal clearly without contempt for those who do not meet it. The married biological mother and father is not one option among many equally ordered to child flourishing. It is the structure most fully ordered to the child's formation as a bodily, relational, identity-bearing person made in the image of a God who is himself communion. Developmental science has confirmed that structure for decades. Holding it honestly — without flinching, without redirecting to adult feelings — is what children's interests require.

References

[^1]: Sara McLanahan and Gary Sandefur, Growing Up with a Single Parent: What Hurts, What Helps (Harvard University Press, 1994); Sara McLanahan, Laura Tach, and Daniel Schneider, "The Causal Effects of Father Absence," Annual Review of Sociology 39 (2013): 399-427.

[^2]: Gabor Maté, In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts (North Atlantic Books, 2008); on proximate separation and the developmental void created by attunement failure rather than overt absence.

[^3]: Jordan Peterson, "God and the Hierarchy of Authority" (lecture); Peterson argues that the empirical case for the two-biological-parent household is not contested by serious developmental data, and that the cultural claim of family-structure equivalence lacks empirical grounding.

[^4]: Paul C. Vitz, William Nordling, and Craig Steven Titus, A Catholic Christian Meta-Model of the Person (Divine Mercy University Press, 2020).