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!

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.