Most nights, Matt Bullen's 7-year-old son sleeps at home with his mom and dad, except for the nights when he sleeps at his dad's girlfriend's house. The arrangement works well because his mom's boyfriend lives there, too. Actually, his mom's boyfriend is married to his dad's girlfriend. Confused? Don't worry, that's just par for the course in polyamorist households. ...

"I don't think it's any different than raising [kids] in a monogamous family," says Robyn Trask, Managing Director of Loving More, a polyamorous magazine and nonprofit organization based in Colorado. "You just have to really talk and communicate with your kids, which is important anyway." Trask raised three kids in a polyamorous household. When her oldest son was 10, she broke the news to him that she and his father had other lovers, expecting it to be a difficult conversation. To her surprise, he rolled with it.

"I explained that we had an open relationship, and that that didn't mean [his father and I] didn't love each other very much," she says. "I asked him how he felt about it, and he said, 'That's kind of cool.'" Now 22, her son identifies as poly and currently has two girlfriends.

For Trask's kids, growing up poly meant they had a large network of aunt- and uncle-like figures to call on. "We have more adults that we can lean on, who can be there for us," says Trask. "That kind of extended family, where there's an intimacy, is really nice."

The unusual family setup does have its drawbacks. Poly kids have to deal with judgmental peers, hiding their true family structure from friends, and the sudden absence of parental figures they have come to love and trust (if their biological parents break up with the boyfriend or girlfriend du jour).

Labels: children, culture, family structure, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 8:34 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TWO Labor MPs have crossed the floor to vote against the Bligh Government's plan to allow gay couples and single parents to have children through surrogacy.

But it was not enough to scuttle the Bill which was passed at 8pm, 45 votes to 36 following a marathon debate. ...

[One Labor MP] revealed he had concerns about the practice of surrogacy because there was a pre-meditated intention to separate a child from their birth mother.

But Mr Choi added that he may have been persuaded to support it as a last resort for infertile heterosexual couples but he could not back a Bill which also "pre-destined" a child to grow up in a family with just one parent or with two parents of the same sex.

Labels: Australia, family structure, surrogate motherhood

posted by Eve at 1:38 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

TRADITIONAL family supporters raised the alarm yesterday after Government research claimed that lesbians made the best parents.

Campaigners said that research paid for with taxpayers’ money to pander to same-sex couples only succeeded in marginalising fathers to the detriment of society.

The National Academy for Parenting Practitioners struck a blow to the heart of the conventional family after it said the latest research showed that children prospered when raised by two women. ...

But the research showed that children brought up by lesbians had higher aspirations to become ­doctors or lawyers and were more confident to fight for social justice.

Speaking last week, director of the research Stephen Scott said: “Lesbians make better parents than a man and a woman.” Campaigners Fathers4Justice attacked the study for failing to promote the role of fathers and laid blame for a pending “unprecedented social ­crisis” at the Government’s door.

Labels: culture, family structure, Fathers, gay parenting, lesbians, parenting, professional associations, Scotland

posted by Eve at 3:07 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

A ground-breaking series of studies, published next month, show liberal attitudes towards the make-up of the family, religion and cultural integration among the modern generation of girls and young women.

The survey, which questioned a representative sample of 1,109 seven to 21 year-olds across the UK, found that a third of girls in the younger age group thought they would be "grown up" by the age of 15, while 90 per cent of 16 to 21-year-olds regarded themselves as "grown up".

Girls were generally positive about marriage but less than half thought it should come before parenthood. One in four thought it was "OK to get married several times", rising to a third in the 16 to 21 age range.

One finding suggested that some teenagers actively plan to become single mothers. Of the girls questioned who had left schools and were unemployed, almost half (45 per cent) expected to have a baby before they were 21.

Labels: adolescence, childhood, children, culture, family structure, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, remarriage, United Kingdom

posted by Eve at 3:28 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

...AOL Health: What do you think your husband gets out of it?

Block: He always tells me two things. One, for him it's about the freedom too. He hasn't had a girlfriend since that first one [we had together]. But he likes the idea of going to a basketball game or a bar and buying some girl a drink and hanging out and not feeling like I'm going to walk in and say, "What the hell is going on here?" It's fun to be attracted to other people. It's fun to feel sexy, after having me barking at him about chores. It's nice to have some pretty girls not yelling at him and see him as a person, not as a husband or a father, but as a person. That feels nice, that feels good. It's that and he feels like a success. When he and I were having troubles, he felt like he was a failure. He wondered what was wrong with him that our marriage wasn't deliriously happy? Now he feels like a success. Because I have everything and he has everything and everybody's happy. A happy, healthy marriage, family and household -- that can be a grand measure of success. ...

AOL Health: You have a daughter who is 10 years old. How much of the nuances of your marriage does she understand?

Block: I don't know. We answer all of her questions and we don't lie to her. My girlfriend is still my best friend, so it's not like she wouldn't be around. She has asked me some very pointed questions, which makes me think she's putting the pieces together. One day she asked me if three people can get married. She asked me if I love Jemma [my girlfriend] as much as I love Daddy. She said to me in the middle of dinner, "I'm really lucky because some people only have one parent and I have three." I said, "Why, do you consider all of us parents?" She said, "Sometimes Jemma makes me dinner and sometimes she picks me up from school. When Daddy cooks dinner, he says to set four places at the table. So we're a family." Kids see the truth and the happy family. That's what they see. If they see screaming and yelling and you keep saying, "No, Mommy loves Daddy," I don't think they buy it. ...

AOL Health: Have you raised her to be aware of alternative marriages and relationships?

Block: Yeah, definitely. I think that's the other thing. We have friends who are gay and lesbian. We talk about adopted families and extended families. We talk all the time about how people can choose to love who they want. Now the law doesn't always recognize those choices and she knows that too. She'll ask us questions, like we have friends who are a lesbian couple who were over one day and they were talking about other parents at the school and Emily asked, "Why do they not want [their children] to play with your daughter?" And I said, "Some people have a problem with two women being married." Her child response was, "That's just stupid." I said "Right, exactly." It's really that simple. We as a family think that it's stupid when people pass judgment on other people for choices that won't [hurt] them. It's plain old biology, you can't be mad at someone who has skin that's a different color, so why the heck would you be mad at someone who falls in love with someone of the same sex? We make it very like, "It is what it is."

AOL Health: Do you feel like you have been away from your husband or your daughter too much because of dating other people?

Block: No. Because, to be honest, before my girlfriend, it was all on trips I would have been on anyway. Since my girlfriend, we're all together. We're either all having dinner, or all hanging out. If I have to go to a review, I review a lot of art shows and concerts and things like that, someone would be going with me and most of the time it's her because my husband doesn't care for being dumped in a room to socialize with strangers. If anything, my work takes me away. I do travel writing. That takes me away, and sometimes I know all three of them would like to strangle me for that.

Labels: family structure, parenting, polyamory

posted by Eve at 2:00 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Terisa Greenan and her boyfriend, Matt, are enjoying a rare day of Seattle sun, sharing a beet carpaccio on the patio of a local restaurant. Matt holds Terisa's hand, as his 6-year-old son squeezes in between the couple to give Terisa a kiss. His mother, Vera, looks over and smiles; she's there with her boyfriend, Larry. Suddenly it starts to rain, and the group must move inside. In the process, they rearrange themselves: Matt's hand touches Vera's leg. Terisa gives Larry a kiss. The child, seemingly unconcerned, puts his arms around his mother and digs into his meal.

Terisa and Matt and Vera and Larry—along with Scott, who's also at this dinner—are not swingers, per se; they aren't pursuing casual sex. Nor are they polygamists of the sort portrayed on HBO's Big Love; they aren't religious, and they don't have multiple wives. But they do believe in "ethical nonmonogamy," or engaging in loving, intimate relationships with more than one person—based upon the knowledge and consent of everyone involved. They are polyamorous, to use the term of art applied to multiple-partner families like theirs, and they wouldn't want to live any other way. ...

Researchers are just beginning to study the phenomenon, but the few who do estimate that openly polyamorous families in the United States number more than half a million, with thriving contingents in nearly every major city. Over the past year, books like Open, by journalist Jenny Block; Opening Up, by sex columnist Tristan Taormino; and an updated version of The Ethical Slut—widely considered the modern "poly" Bible—have helped publicize the concept. Today there are poly blogs and podcasts, local get-togethers, and an online polyamory magazine called Loving More with 15,000 regular readers. Celebrities like actress Tilda Swinton and Carla Bruni, the first lady of France, have voiced support for nonmonogamy, while Greenan herself has become somewhat of an unofficial spokesperson, as the creator of a comic Web series about the practice—called "Family"—that's loosely based on her life. "There have always been some loud-mouthed ironclads talking about the labors of monogamy and multiple-partner relationships," says Ken Haslam, a retired anesthesiologist who curates a polyamory library at the Indiana University-based Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender and Reproduction. "But finally, with the Internet, the thing has really come about."

With polyamorists' higher profile has come some growing pains. The majority of them don't seem particularly interested in pressing a political agenda; the joke in the community is that the complexities of their relationships leave little time for activism. But they are beginning to show up on the radar screen of the religious right, some of whose leaders have publicly condemned polyamory as one of a host of deviant behaviors sure to become normalized if gay marriage wins federal sanction. "This group is really rising up from the underground, emboldened by the success of the gay-marriage movement," says Glenn Stanton, the director of family studies for Focus on the Family, an evangelical Christian group. "And while there's part of me that says, 'Oh, my goodness, I don't think I could see them make grounds,' there's another part of me that says, 'Well, just watch them.' "

Conservatives are not alone in watching warily. Gay-marriage advocates have become leery of public association with the poly cause—lest it give their enemies ammunition. As Andrew Sullivan, the Atlantic columnist, wrote recently, "I believe that someone's sexual orientation is a deeper issue than the number of people they want to express that orientation with." In other words, polyamory is a choice; homosexuality is not. It's these dynamics that have made polyamory, as longtime poly advocate Anita Wagner puts it, "the political football in the culture war as it relates to same-sex marriage."

Polys themselves are not visibly crusading for their civil rights. But there is one policy issue rousing concern: legal precedents concerning their ability to parent. Custody battles among poly parents are not uncommon; the most public of them was a 1999 case in which a 22-year-old Tennessee woman lost rights to parent her daughter after outing herself on an MTV documentary. Anecdotally, research shows that children can do well in poly families—as long as they're in a stable home with loving parents, says Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist at Georgia State University, who is conducting the first large-scale study of children of poly parents, which has been ongoing for a decade. But because academia is only beginning to study the phenomenon—Sheff's study is too recent to have drawn conclusions about the children's well-being over time—there is little data to support that notion in court. Today, the nonprofit Polyamory Society posts a warning to parents on its Web site: If your PolyFamily has children, please do not put your children and family at risk by coming out to the public or by being interviewed [by] the press! ...

The child, meanwhile, has his own room. And he's clearly the most delicate part of the equation. Matt and Vera have asked NEWSWEEK not to use their last names—or the name of their child—for fear, even in liberal Seattle, they might draw unwanted attention. Though Terisa doesn't have children—and doesn't want them—she adores Matt and Vera's son, who calls her Auntie. Recently, the child asked his father who he loved more: Mommy or Terisa. "I said, 'Of course I love momma more,' because that's the answer he needed to hear," Matt says. He and Vera say they are honest with him, in an age-appropriate way. "We don't do anything any regular parents of a 6-year-old wouldn't do," he says. For the moment, it seems to be working. The child is happy, and there are two extra people to help him with his homework, or to pick him up or drop him off at school. They expect the questions to increase with age, but in the long run, "what's healthy for children is stability," says Fischer, the anthropologist.

Labels: culture, family structure, polyamory

posted by Eve at 10:12 AM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

When the American Law Institute published its long-awaited proposals for sweeping changes in divorce law in 2002, they were met with great fanfare. One academic predicted the proposals would be a “resounding success,” while the New York Times said they would likely have a “major impact” on the development of the law.

But a recent empirical study of the recommendations indicates that the group’s proposals—formally known as the Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution—have been a resounding flop.

To date, only West Virginia has enacted legislation referencing any part of the ALI’s proposals, according to the study, American Law Insti­tute’s Principles of the Law of Family Dissolution, Eight Years After Adoption: Guiding Principles or Obligatory Foot­note? The study was published in the ABA’s Family Law Quarterly, fall 2008 edition.

West Virginia adopted principles relating to child custody in 2003; oth­er provisions deal with alimony, the division of property and the rights of unmarried cohabitating couples, gay and straight.

The ALI proposals have fared only slightly better in the courts. Accord­ing to the study, only 100 cases have cited the ALI’s principles since work on the group’s proposals began in 1990; that’s fewer than half the number of cases citing other treatises on tort law and remedies that were pub­lished around the same time. And the courts in those cases rejected the ALI’s proposals more often than they accepted them, by a ratio of more than 1½-to-1.

Labels: beyond marriage, cohabitation, divorce, family structure

posted by Imapp Staff at 4:36 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT

Labels: committed relationships, divorce, donor conception, family structure, gay marriage, parenting, remarriage

posted by Eve at 2:58 PM EMAIL SHARE PRINT