In the first part of this article, I looked at what happens when we take chosen family out of the realm of beautiful ideas and put some flesh on the bones. What does it actually require from the people inside it? Who is responsible, who has authority, who fills the gaps, and where does the child sit in all of that?
But there is another part of family life that I think becomes even more interesting once we start thinking systemically: change. Because things change all the time. People change, relationships change, capacity shifts, children grow, one person falls in love, another gets overwhelmed, somebody wants more closeness, somebody wants less. And then there is the family system around all of that, trying to absorb it somehow.
What stayed with me from Terry Real’s Thinking Systemically workshop is that change never happens in isolation. If one person changes, the people around them have to adjust too, and they may not particularly want to. An established family dynamic may be painful, but it is also familiar. Everyone has already learned where to stand inside it. So when one person suddenly understands something about themselves, decides they no longer want to play the same role, or simply starts behaving differently, the rest of the system does not necessarily celebrate the breakthrough. They may resist it, get angry, withdraw, criticise, try to pull the person back into the old position. And people rarely change at the same speed.
Now put that inside a polycule with children.
There are more relationships, more points of connection, more people whose lives are affected when something moves. And polyamory probably asks us to absorb more relational change than many monogamous family structures do: new partners, shifting closeness, different amounts of time and attention, changes in household or parenting roles, relationships ending while other relationships continue. At the same time, most of us learned how family works in families of origin that were probably monogamous and had much more culturally established ideas about who belonged, who had authority, who did what, and what was supposed to stay stable.
So there is a tension here that I find really interesting. We may be deliberately trying to break old patterns, including some that have travelled through generations, while building a family structure that actually requires more flexibility from us than the one our parents had. And we are doing that with the same nervous systems, defences, conflict habits and ideas about love that we learned there.
Which is why, for me, the question is not only what happens to the child when the adults change? It is also what is the child learning from the way the family handles change?
Do people scream, criticise, disappear, freeze each other out? Can they talk? Can somebody regulate themselves enough to stay in the conversation? Can they help each other without taking over? Is disagreement dangerous? Is changing your mind allowed? Does one person's growth become everyone else's threat? Can the family adapt without somebody having to become the problem?
Children are living inside those answers long before they can explain them. And eventually they may carry some version of them into their own adult relationships.
So before looking at how a poly family absorbs change, I think we need to look at the system that is already there.
What we say we believe is not necessarily how the family works
Poly communities tend to be very thoughtful about values: autonomy, consent, equality, freedom, compersion, chosen family. What a beautiful world this could be...
But a family is eventually shaped much more by what people repeatedly do than by what they believe they are doing. A household can sincerely believe in equality while one woman keeps track of everyone's appointments, food, emotional state and children's clothes. People can talk about autonomy while one adult has become terrified of disappointing everybody. Parents can talk about compersion while their child quietly learns to check whether Mum is okay whenever Dad goes on a date.
This is where looking at the whole family becomes useful.
Instead of only asking what everyone wants, you can start asking things like:
If this person stopped doing everything they currently do, what would happen? Who would step in?
Who notices first when something needs doing?
Whose upset changes everybody else's behaviour?
Who can leave the house without thinking about childcare, and who can't?
Who is allowed to disappoint whom?
Which relationships could change without turning the child's world upside down?
What is the child learning to do to keep the adults okay?
And one I especially like: Where are we relying on goodwill where we actually need an agreement? Goodwill may be lovely, but sleep deprivation has opinions.
What happens when one person changes?
And then we get to resistance.
Families, even chosen ones, like well-established dances. Even when a dynamic isn’t working particularly well, people have usually found a way to live inside it. One takes care of everyone, another avoids conflict, one makes most of the decisions, somebody keeps the peace, somebody gets to be the difficult one. After a while these roles stop feeling like roles and start feeling like who everyone is.
Which makes change complicated.
If the person who has always taken care of everybody starts saying no, this affects much more than that one person. If someone stops fixing everyone’s feelings, asks for more independence, wants to parent differently or questions an agreement that had slowly become normal, everyone around them has to find a new position too. Some will welcome that. Others may feel angry, scared, criticised, abandoned, or simply very inconvenienced by it.
And I think this is an important part of systemic thinking: even a change that is good for one person can destabilise something that was working for somebody else.
People also don’t arrive at these realisations together. One person may have spent six months thinking about something, talking about it in therapy and eventually reaching the glorious aha! moment, while everyone else finds out about the new reality on Tuesday over breakfast. They need time to catch up, and sometimes they don’t want to go in the same direction at all.
In a couple, there are already two people adjusting to that movement. In a polycule with children, one change can travel through several relationships, different households, parenting arrangements and attachment relationships at the same time. So I become interested in how much movement the whole family can take before somebody starts carrying more than their share of it.
And especially what the children do with it.
When the adults disagree about where the family is going, do the children still know what stays reliable? Can they remain children while the adults figure things out, or do they start becoming quieter, easier, more helpful, more watchful? Do they learn that changing your mind is possible, or that change causes chaos? Do they see people disagree and eventually find a new way of being together, or does distance, criticism and silence become the way change is handled?
There is a practical and legal layer here too. In Germany, as in many places, the people who function as a child’s family are not necessarily the people recognised as parents by law. If somebody becomes ill, leaves, dies, wants to move, or an adult relationship ends, emotional bonds and legal responsibilities may suddenly turn out to be very different things.
A chosen family can feel completely solid until something changes enough to show you which parts of that solidity were actually built into the structure, and which parts depended on everyone continuing to want roughly the same things.
Five questions I keep coming back to
This whole line of thinking brings me back to five things that sit underneath most of my work: agency, capacity, safety, intentionality and change.
I think they become especially useful in a family because they force us to look past what everybody says they want and ask what the system is actually making possible.
With agency, I want to know who can really choose. Who can say yes, no, not now, or I changed my mind without losing their place in the relationship or the family? And for the child, where do they get choice without being made responsible for adult decisions?
With capacity, I want to know whether the family can actually hold what it is trying to create. There may be plenty of love and very little time, energy, money, sleep or emotional bandwidth. A structure can be beautiful in theory and still ask too much from the people inside it.
With safety, I look at what people can trust when things get difficult. Can they depend on each other, disagree, ask for reassurance, disappoint each other, move away and come back? Does the child know who is still there when the adults are angry, jealous, heartbroken or changing their minds?
With intentionality, I ask how much of the family was really chosen. Who became the organiser, the main caregiver, the peacemaker, the person everyone calls when something goes wrong? Which roles were discussed, and which ones simply became normal because somebody kept doing them?
And with change, I want to know what happens when one of those things moves. When someone wants something different, loses capacity, stops playing an old role, falls in love, falls out of love, or simply cannot keep doing what they have always done. Who adjusts? Who resists? Who takes over? And what do the children learn from watching the family find its new balance?
For me, that is where the five come together. A family system is not only about whether people love each other or share the same values. It is about whether there is enough freedom, enough capacity, enough safety and enough awareness for people to keep changing without the whole structure quietly asking one person, especially a child, to carry the cost.
Let’s not reinvent the wheel. We have a chance to build a better one.
Poly families are not suddenly inventing communal parenting from scratch, and I don’t think saying “humans used to live in tribes” solves very much.
Yes, people have raised children in bigger family systems for a very long time. There was more shared care, more adults around, more people who could cook, watch the children, notice when somebody was struggling. But those systems also came with very clear rules about who had power, who sacrificed, who did the caring and, very often, what women were supposed to do with their lives.
Then we got the nuclear family, with much more freedom to choose how we want to live and who we want to build a life with, while somehow also deciding that two exhausted people should be able to work, raise children, run a household, have a relationship and preferably still have sex with each other at the end of the week.
So what interests me is what intentionally built families can learn from both.
Can we have more people caring for a child while still being clear about who is actually responsible, allow several adults to become important attachment figures without pretending they all have the same role, and give the adults more freedom to love, change, leave relationships and build new ones without expecting the children to simply absorb whatever happens around them?
And then there is the part I keep coming back to throughout this article: what are the children learning from the way we do it?
Because they are not only growing up in whatever family structure we create. They are also learning relationships from it. Who gets to choose, who takes care of whom, what happens when somebody says no, whether people can be depended on, what conflict does to a relationship, whose distress becomes somebody else’s responsibility, and whether the family can change shape without putting belonging into question.
I think this is where poly families have both an opportunity and quite a lot of work to do. Once we remove some of the pre-written structure around what a family is supposed to look like, we have much more freedom to decide what we actually want to build. But then we also have to decide. Otherwise the gaps will still get filled, the roles will still appear, somebody will still carry the invisible work, and the child will still learn from whatever system we accidentally created.
So I keep coming back to the same question:
Who is holding what here?
And if somewhere in that process the child becomes the one keeping even one other person in the system ok, I think that's where the adults need to have another look at what they've built.