Are two mums better than one? The findings of a recent study would appear to suggest so. We examine the experiences of three female couples to see how they and their children have fared.

Do lesbian couples make the best parents? Taking the household in the 2010 movie The Kids Are All Right as a benchmark, you might suspect so. Stressed but responsible Nic (Annette Bening) and creative, easygoing Jules (Julianne Moore) have two teenage children - both of whom are smart, successful and decent at an age when most people barely qualify as human. Which is not that surprising, given how loving and involved Nic and Jules are as parents.

It wouldn't be much of a film without conflict, of course, and certainly not the kind to earn Annette Bening a Best Actress Oscar nomination. Jules's infidelity threatens to tear the family apart (as well as irritating some viewers, who wonder why a gay woman would have an affair with the distinctly hirsute and manly Mark Ruffalo). But even so, Nic and Jules - the first lesbian parents to anchor a mainstream movie, in a project Bening has described as "a labour of love" - are indisputably great at running a family.

But then two mothers are generally better than one, according to a study published in the US journal Pediatrics last year. It found that children raised by lesbian couples generally have greater academic success, higher self-esteem and fewer behavioural problems than those who grow up with heterosexual parents. A controversial conclusion, but not a hasty one: the couples who took part were recruited between 1986 and 1992, and research on their 78 collective children (now in their late teens) is ongoing.

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