Parents who use assisted reproduction technology (ART) may be more receptive and nurturing than those who conceive their children naturally, researchers report.

A follow-up of 400 European families, conducted when the children were 12 years of age, suggests that in vitro fertilization or donor insemination may have a positive effect on the quality of the parent-child relationship.

These children may also be more psychologically healthy than their counterparts who were conceived naturally, as well as adopted children, according to the researchers, who presented their findings here at the XII World Congress on In Vitro Fertilization and Molecular Reproduction.
“Results might be considered surprising, especially because psychologists tend to predict negative outcomes of our studies”
Dr. Susan Golombok, lead author of the European Study of Assisted Reproduction Families

Researchers interviewed children and their parents to gain information on social and emotional function, as well as parenting quality. The study included 400 British, Spanish, Dutch and Italian families.

According to the investigators, the families who had used ART rated similarly to adoptive and natural-conception families on many measures of the quality of parent-child relationships and children’s psychological well-being. No difference was found between family types for marital satisfaction, anxiety or depression.

But some significant differences tended to favour the ART families, Golombok noted. Mothers who had used ART rated higher for emotional involvement, whereas fathers from the same group had higher scores for expressed warmth, enjoyment of fatherhood and emotional involvement than parents in the other two groups.

Children who had been conceived through fertility treatments reported higher levels of warmth from their fathers than adopted children, and were less likely to engage in physical aggression toward their peers.

“The strong desire to become parents seems to have made them (the ART parents) more involved in parenting,” Golombok commented.

On the other hand, these parents may be overprotective, as their children reported less criticism by their parents than their adopted and naturally conceived counterparts, the authors note. However, this feature involved just a ‘small proportion’ of the ART families, they added.