Throuples Demand for Representation for Kids with Three Parents

UNKNOWN: “Every single day I become a bigger advocate for raising children in groups of three or more, because, like, I get there are lots of people who are very happily single-parenting or raising their children as twosomes. That’s cool. That’s great for you. But for those of you thinking about doing something different, I just want you to know, like, it is possible to do so, because there is no representation of us, right? There’s no ‘Bluey’ episode about the kid with three parents, but we’re out here just doing our thing. In our case, a single parent by choice teamed up with an existing couple, we decided to make a kid together and raising that kid as a group. You could be in a romantic throuple, you could be three best friends, you could have more adults involved if you want to, as long as you are all committed to this child-rearing thing. And certainly it takes some extra negotiating, right? The more people you have, the more opinions you have. And we had to have some hard talks about things like who was going to be genetically related to our child and who wasn’t. That was tricky, but also it was kind of just a moment in time in comparison to the 18-plus-year commitment that is raising a human being and putting them out into the world, because, all my gosh, raising kids is so much work. It kind of reminds me of the early days of, like, union organizing where people were fighting for an eight-hour workday so that they could have eight hours of rest and and then eight hours of daily life. Like, that’s what we need as a parenting group. So right now, my husband is at work making a paycheck, my co-parent is at the daycare center with their kid, and I’m going to have a nice cup of coffee and go work on my novel. And that is what works for us, and we’re still so tired at the end of the day that sometimes we’re like, ‘Gosh, do we need a fourth person involved here?’ So just if you’re thinking about it, if this is something you want to learn more about, like, we are here, we’re doing this thing, and it can work beautifully. That’s all I just want you to know.”