blogs at Psychology Today:
…Now, about the children. I wish I could say that there are stacks of methodologically rigorous studies comparing the implications for children whose parents are or are not polyamorous. Instead, there are very few, so any conclusions are tentative at best.
The authors of the review article believe that the implications for the children of their parents’ relationships are most likely to be noteworthy if those relationships are not hidden from the children. So the review article focuses on those families in which some or all of the various partners are involved in the children’s lives, either as co-parents or in roles similar to those of aunts or uncles.
Elisabeth Sheff has conducted two studies of the well-being of the children of polyamorous parents. In one, she interviewed the parents, and in the other, she talked to children between 5 and 18 years old. (Based on what is reported in the review article, I don’t think she interviewed other families for comparison. Like I said, we need more research, and more rigorous research.)
The Perspective of the Polyamorous Parents
In the interviews, the parents described a number of ways their children benefited from the polyamory:
- “The children had more individualized time with adults.”
- They “could spend less time in day care because of the flexibility of having multiple parental figures involved in their lives.”
- “…the greater diversity of interests available from adult figures helped children foster a wider variety of hobbies and skills.”
The parents mentioned drawbacks as well, particularly “the discomfort of having partnerships between adults dissolve and the resulting emotional trauma for children who may have been very attached to a departing partner.”
The Perspective of the Children
The children Sheff interviewed were mostly White and middle class. Her impression was that they were “articulate, thoughtful, intelligent, and secure in their relationships with their parents.” The older children were more aware of being in an unusual family situation than the younger ones, but they were not questioned by school personnel or other students about having multiple parental figures in their lives because so many of the other students did, too (e.g., step-parents, romantic partners of single parents).
The children did not express the same concern with the real or potential loss of adult attachments as their parents did. As the authors of the review article explained:
“Many of the children reported that their parents’ former partners stayed involved in their lives even after the sexual or romantic phase of the partners’ relationships to the parents ended. The children did report experiencing some pain at losing the friendship of adults who were not involved in their lives any longer, but they felt this pain for both former romantic partners and also for platonic friends of parents whom they no longer saw for a variety of reasons.”
more (and more here, including bibliographies; and “Note that much of the information comes only from gay couples.”)
January 10th, 2013 | 5:24 am
Some fifty years ago, I knew an old lady, the widow of a man, who had held the post of British Resident in several of the princely states of India.
The wife of the Resident was expected to visit and cultivate the acquaintance of the ladies of the Zenana, or harem. For this she was well-qualified, being fluent in Persian (the language of many of the courts), Urdu and several other Indian dialects. A grateful British government acknowledged her services by creating her a Dame Commander of the Indian Empire.
The picture she painted (and she was an excellent raconteuse) was one of bitter jealousies, rivalries, murderous hatreds and shifting tactical alliances, between the ruler’s mother, his favourite wife and the chief eunuch, with the others ingratiating themselves as the self-seeking tools of one or other of these. The unexplained death of children, especially sons, was not uncommon. Her description recalled the intrigues of Renaissance Italy or of France during the Frondes.
I should imagine the dynamics of polyamorous families are not that different.
January 10th, 2013 | 7:48 am
Let us never lose sight of the fact that a “polyamorous” family situation is, per se, a negative influence on the children. Because it gives scandal, teaches the children to consider unchastity in general and adultery in particular to be a normal thing.
Herein, of course, is a pitfall of social research. Categories of inquiry, and design of the inquiries themselves, are arbitrarily set, under the best of circumstances, by the expectations of the researchers. The latter are increasingly secular-materialist in their outlook, thus ensuring that some of the most important aspects of human nature (love, morality, relationship to transcendents of truth, beauty, and goodness–dare we say also, God) are given short shrift.
January 10th, 2013 | 8:16 am
Not sure this tells us much of anything, esp. since truely polyamous couples are relatively rare IMO. One interesting question that leaps out is the assumption that anything that causes pain for a child is automatically bad. Exactly how does anyone get through childhood without feeling something like ‘pain at the loss of a friend’? It’s understandable that parents have an instinct to try to shield their children from this pain but I suspect if you could somehow raise a kid shielded from all types of pain like this you’re going to end up with a not very nice adult. While pain suffered from a loss can be very harmful it’s also very necessary IMO to teach just how valuable things are.
January 10th, 2013 | 10:41 am
And the commenters here prove once again that people will do any amount of mental acrobatics to avoid actually having to treat those different from themselves like human beings. Let’s start with the irrelevant tale of 1960′s British woman and her experiences with indian nobility.
That whole story presupposes a situation that has literally nothing to do with modern polyamory. You explicitly state that this was a case of one man having a harem of women in a religion-based, patriarchial social structure. Polyamory is completely different from that, so right off the bat your comparison is rendered flawed and nearly worthless (A fair number of polyamorists are some variety of Pagan or subscribe to religions that are far less mainstream, and a significant portion or agnostic or atheists) but i won’t go further into the irrelevance of it due to character limit.
Joe DeVet and Boontons comments simply smack of sheer ignorance and a heavy dose of bias. Joe makes some compelling arguments about the possibility of flawed research, but offers no evidence to support that argument logically and so that too is invalid. Boonton makes a good point about pain and difficulty being an essential part of forming healthy, well-adjusted adults, and that I agree wholeheartedly on. What I can’t agree on is that ‘God’ or any such religious considerations are a prerequisite for morality, but that is a different topic.
January 10th, 2013 | 12:45 pm
Jonathan Collier
I fail to see how the religious basis of the structure has the least bearing on the range of emotions generated in the hot-house atmosphere of polyamorous relationships. Jealousy, rivalry and hatred are not the exclusive preserve of the religious, mainstream or otherwise.
January 10th, 2013 | 2:56 pm
Michael PS – Consider harems and prisons (and royal courts, and high fashion… and, sadly, many schools). From this essay:
“The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow… We have a phrase to describe what happens when rankings have to be created without any meaningful criteria. We say that the situation degenerates into a popularity contest… Instead of depending on some real test, one’s rank depends mostly on one’s ability to increase one’s rank.”
Families, even polyamorous ones, don’t seem to fit that model. At least, there’s no prima facie reason why they’d have to be.
January 11th, 2013 | 7:21 am
I’m not sure why my comment smacked of ‘sheer ignorance’ when the only thing Mr. Collier could address specifically was something he said was an ‘excellent point’.
Michael PS’s analogy is flawed IMO. First it’s not clear he is describing a real polygamous case. I believe in many royal families it was accepted as a given that a king or prince would have numerous women he may cheat on his wife with, but that doesn’t alter the status of his wife as wife. Second he fails to account that a good portion of the ‘hothouse of ‘jealousy, rivalry and hatred’ is coming from the fact that this is a royal family he is describing with a royal family that had serious power, including possibly even the ability to punish people it dislikes. Would such passions be at play if the man in this case was no king or prince but just ‘Joe’ with a moderately successful plumbinb business?
January 11th, 2013 | 7:30 am
Definition wise Michael PS also treats polygamy = polyamory.
Polygamy is one man with multiple wives and the presumption that the man has some higher level of say in this relationship (for example, the man may decide to marry a new wife over the wishes of existing ones…but the wives can’t decide to add a new wife without the man’s consent). I suppose you could construct some type of polygamy with equality among the sexes but those that actually do it don’t practice it that way IMO.
Polyamory involves multiple partners by either sex. Clearly his analogy to the harem would not fit that model as harem girls and wives were not allowed to establish their own relationships with other men.
It should be noted that the study described is by no means conclusive. It simply consisted of asking parents what they thought the pros and cons were of polyamory and then asking the kids what they thought and discovering that while parents were concerned with the kids losing adult figures they’ve grown attached to, the kids reporting it was not a big deal.
Neither, of course, proves no bad effects are being produced but it is useful data. If you’re wondering whether someone is psychologically harmed asking them seems like a good first step.
January 11th, 2013 | 7:38 am
At this point we should bring up The Nurture Assumption by Judith Rich Harris. The assumption here is that the way parents raise their kids make them into adults hence all these studies to see if various parenting styles ‘help or hurt’ kids.
Fact is these studies almost always end up inconclusive because there’s little good evidence that parenting styles do anything good or bad to kids. Kids learn very early on how to manipulate parents and they then turn their efforts to pleasing their peer groups. You are more likely to turn out better if you’re born to a dysfunctional fmaily in a good neighborhood than if you are born to a strong healthy family in a very bad neighborhood.
This doesn’t mean that you can abuse your kids with no harm or that making great efforts on behalf of your kids has no rewards. It does mean, though, that parents should feel liberated. Every quirk their kids have are NOT due to some seemingly minor error their parents made in toilet training or punishing them.
This also means studies of kids raised by gay, straight, polygamous or whatever types of parents are unlikely to demonstrate any noticeable advantage or disadvantage. Find some other way to demonstrate your morality, it’s not going to come from looking at your kids’ SAT scores!
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