There is still, evidence that courts and social commentators are beginning to extend token recognition to diversity, alternative lifestyles and the movement of the family away from the traditional nuclear model.
Courts currently do not recognize that the realities of a child's life do not depend upon legal rules. Their lives are more complex that than the one-mother/one-father model suggests. Variation from the one-mother/one-father prescription for parenthood is common (293). Communal child rearing, surrogacy, open adoption stepfamilies, and extramarital births all destroy the myth of family homogeneity.
In the American legal system, the solution to the inconsistencies and uncertainties lays within the law. One solution consistently proposed by commentators is the need for the legislature to develop an expand legal definition of "parent."(295) It is felt that lesbian-mother and gay-father families, if not considered "nontraditional families" are ill served by rigid definitions of parenthood. "Current theories underlying the legal definition of parent, wholly deny the existence of nontraditional families"(Melton 109).
For example, the first theory is that every child should have one mother and one father, neither more nor less; the second theory is that those two persons identified as mother and father should have all the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, while non-parents should have little or none. .
These statutory limitations lead to an unfair result when a same-sex couple mutually decide to raise a family together prior to the birth of any children and after a child is born by one, if they wish the other to legally adopt that child. Under this new definition of "parent," all those considered parents would be accorded the rights and responsibilities of parenthood, while none will be accorded on those who do not meet this definition (113). In addition, commentators propose that the concept of parenthood would be a status available to individuals regardless of their gender.
