Family

What Parenting In A Polyamorous Family Is Really Like

Photo: Olesia Bilkei / Shutterstock
parents pushing kids in strollers

Parenting and polyamory have their ups and downs.

We're more than two, so we have more adult supervision if needed. Moreover, we have an option for date nights almost any time we wish, in almost any configuration you could imagine.

Date night doesn't always have to be fancy; just being able to sit down and have an after-work glass of wine and a chat while someone else takes the kids to bed is a balm for the soul.

On the other hand, parenting in a polyamorous family means managing more parenting styles.

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I guess we're the opposite of a divorced family where kids get everything twice if they play their cards right.

We have to arrange a lot (thanks, Google Calendar) more, and communicate more to be on the same side of everything when it comes to educating, safeguarding, and parenting them.

The kids love it. There's always someone who will play with them, always someone to ask for help, always someone to explain things.

Since we all have our distinct circle of friends, too, and those people like to come by a lot with their kids, it's never boring in the lodge.

Tonight (it's 9 PM here), I bathed them (my fault; I let them help me make cookies, they looked like a gingerbread nightmare movie) while the ladies played Guild Wars 2 together and got dinner ready.

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While we ate (and shared stories; it's the best time of the day for me), we divided up the chores for the week (I got slapped with an extra "remove all cookie dough from various sites in the house") one, and later one will go on a date while we're doing laundry.

We're a normal, happy, slightly more social family. 

The thing about us is that we didn't start into this polysyllabic world of high-brow poly pod parenting.

We just let it happen, working with the kids to not feel different (and if they did to see it as an amazing thing), and our circle of friends and the kids' school friends see it as a good thing, largely because they see how happy the kids are.

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Our teacher asked us a few weeks in about the whole setup. We explained it as gently as we could.

She asked if she could come by and see it (we're not the first poly family in the school, but the others seemed to be worried to be judged and might have construed it as a veiled welfare check), and we let her.

When she came over, I was in the middle of building a life-sized Angry Birds level in the dining room, one partner was working from home, and the other one was in the basement hanging laundry.

She stuck around until after dinner, left, and has since had nothing but good things to say about our form of parenting (always prefixed by "I couldn't do this, this wouldn't work for me, but...").

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J. Mikka Luster is a freelance writer, psychologist, and medic from Germany.