On Tuesday I spent three hours in a workshop with Terry Real called Thinking Systemically.
Terry trained in the family therapy tradition before developing Relational Life Therapy, and a lot of the workshop was about shifting the focus from the individual to the system.
Not only: What is this person doing?
But:
What happens between people?
What function does this behaviour serve in the system?
What keeps the problem in place?
And one question that stayed with me afterwards:
What happens when we try to change it?
I left the workshop thinking about polyamory.
More specifically, I started wondering what happens when we apply systemic thinking to poly parenting.
Not is polyamory good or bad for children? I don't think that question is particularly useful.
I mean something much more structural: What kind of family are we actually building around the child? Who does what? Who carries what? What happens when somebody falls in love, has a baby, burns out, breaks up, moves out or simply stops having the capacity they had six months ago?
That is where polyamory becomes fascinating from a systemic perspective, because a lot of what monogamous families inherit from culture ( mother, father, couple, grandparents, who counts as family, who has authority) has to be much more consciously decided. That gives us more freedom, but it also means there is more that can remain undefined.
And undefined doesn’t mean nonexistent.
Someone will eventually fill the space.
The village sounds lovely. Until we ask who is doing the laundry.
I am very attracted to the idea of children growing up with more adults around them. Humans have raised children with substantial help from people other than their biological parents for a very long time, and research on poly families also describes children developing meaningful relationships with parents’ partners and benefiting from additional care, resources and adult attention.
It also seems obvious to me that the nuclear family (in the modern understanding of it) asks a slightly absurd amount of two people. We expect one romantic relationship to carry love, sex, money, parenting, practical life, emotional support, domestic labour and often most of the care work, while everyone is also supposed to remain attractive, regulated and vaguely interesting.
So yes, more trusted adults can create more capacity. If one person is sick, overwhelmed, heartbroken, travelling or simply has nothing left that day, the child does not necessarily have to lose stability with them. There may be another adult who knows them well, another pair of hands, another nervous system that is not already at 98%.
But I don’t think the conclusion is simply: great, let’s bring back the tribe.
Because the tribe came with a structure too.
Traditional extended-family systems usually had fairly clear answers to questions like who had authority, who earned money, who cared for the children, who sacrificed, whose sexuality was controlled and whose needs came last. And an enormous amount of that work fell on women.
So for me the interesting possibility is not recreating the old village. It is asking whether we can keep some of what was good about distributed care without automatically importing the old distribution of power with it.
If nobody is holding something, the function doesn’t disappear
One of the things I kept thinking about after the workshop was the idea of the empty space.
Who remembers the Kita paperwork? Who notices that a child has suddenly become quieter? Who gets up at 3am? Who knows when the doctor appointment is? Who decides whether another episode of Peppa Pig will destroy civilisation? Who is willing to be unpopular and say no? Who steps in when another adult behaves in a way that isn't okay around the child?
Not having an explicit structure doesn't mean there is no structure. It just means you may discover the structure later. Usually when somebody is exhausted and furious.
Because that someone had started doing them. Maybe it is the biological mother because she believes that’s her responsibility. Maybe it is the most conscientious person. Maybe it is the person with the most flexible job. Maybe it is the one who finds it hardest to say no.
And sometimes the child starts filling an empty space too. But they will do it in silence, so that structure will stay hidden till it comes up years later in their own couple therapy.
This is one of the places where I think alternative family structures need to be particularly careful. Additional adults are not automatically additional parents. A child can have several important adults without all of them having the same authority, responsibility or commitment to staying in the child's life.
That distinction is important, because many people who build alternative families are deliberately questioning hierarchy between adults. And children still need one hierarchy to remain clear: the adults are responsible for the children, not the other way around.
That doesn't mean authoritarian parenting. Children can have agency, responsabilities, chores, opinions, boundaries and a real say in their own lives.
But they shouldn’t have to hold the adults together.
“She is so empathic” can mean several different things
Children are extremely good at reading what is happening around them.
A child notices when Mum gets sad because her partner spends the night somewhere else. She notices when two adults stop talking to each other. She notices the tension around somebody entering the room.
And then she adapts.
Maybe the child gets extra cuddly. Or behaves beautifully that evening. Or stops asking for something because Mum already seems overwhelmed.
It can look incredibly sweet. Maybe everybody thinks: She's so empathic. But there is an important question underneath that: Is she noticing Mum's feelings, or is she starting to feel responsible for changing them? Those are very different things.
The same thing can happen when a child learns:
Dad is upset, so I’d better behave.
Mum has the baby, so I shouldn't need anything right now.
If I talk about how much I like Mum's girlfriend, maybe Dad will feel bad.
Everyone is tense, so I'll be funny.
Nobody necessarily tells the child to do any of this. The child simply detects a role that needs performing and steps into it.
Helping is not the problem
This doesn't mean children shouldn't contribute to family life.
A three-year-old putting napkins on the table is participation. An older child occasionally helping a younger sibling can be competence, connection and belonging. Teenagers can cook, help around the house and be useful members of a family.
This is why I really like this question: If the child stopped doing it, would the adults still be able to run the family?
If yes, it's probably participation. If no, something needs looking at. The problem isn't children helping. It's the adults needing the child to perform something that belongs to the adults.
One family can contain several different systems
This is probably one of the places where systemic thinking becomes particularly useful in polyamory.
The people we love, the people we live with, the people who parent our children and the people our children become attached to may overlap. But they aren't necessarily the same people.
I find it useful to separate four things.
The romantic relationships: who dates whom, loves whom, sleeps with whom.
The household: who lives together, pays for what, cooks, cleans, drives, shops.
The parenting relationships: who is responsible for the child, makes decisions, sets limits and shows up when things are difficult.
And then the child's own relationships: who they trust, love, depend on and experience as family.
These four things may overlap beautifully. But they shouldn't automatically be treated as the same thing.
Someone becoming an important partner to a parent doesn't automatically make them a parent to the child. Someone living in the house doesn't automatically mean they want a parenting role.
And the reverse matters too. If somebody has become deeply important to a child, an adult breakup doesn't erase that relationship just because the romantic relationship ended.
This is one place where I think adult freedom and children's needs have to be thought about separately. Adult relationships may be able to change relatively quickly. Parenting and attachment need much more intentionality.
“We're all family” isn't enough
I love chosen family. I like the idea of children growing up surrounded by people who love them. But “we're all family” doesn't actually tell you very much about responsibility.
Who is a parent?
Who has made a long-term commitment to caring for this child?
Who is a trusted adult who may sometimes help but isn't responsible for raising them?
Who happens to share the household?
And what happens when somebody no longer wants the role they originally imagined?
These roles don't have to be fixed forever. People change. Families change. But I think they need to be visible. Because loving a child and being responsible for a child are related, but they are not the same thing.
One of the biggest advantages may simply be that there is backup
This was one of the things that clicked for me when I started looking at the whole family rather than at the individual relationships.
We often talk about poly families in terms of more love. But practically, one of their greatest strengths might be something much less romantic: more than one person can carry the load.
If one adult is exhausted, the child can still have another adult with energy. If somebody is sick, heartbroken or overloaded with work, everyday life doesn't necessarily fall apart. The child can potentially have continuity even while one adult is going through something difficult.
That is a huge resource.
Children can also grow up seeing adults with different strengths and different ways of relating. They may see men doing care work, women having identities beyond motherhood, affection that isn't limited to biology, and relationships being discussed rather than simply assumed.
There is a lot that could be genuinely rich about that.
But it only works if people know who is responsible. Otherwise having more adults can create exactly the opposite problem: I thought somebody else was watching her.
And there is a rather terrifyingly short distance between “it takes a village” and nobody knowing who actually has the child.