In non-nuclear families, the third "parent" is normally an uncle, aunt, or grandparent that can provide additional financial support and babysitting options for the two parents. This is common in many countries where multiple generations of extended families live in the same house or neighborhood.

My in laws live literally a block away and watch our kids multiple times a week. The girls sleep over there sometimes too.

In no way are either of them a third 'parent'. This idea that grandparents and aunts and uncles can actually be a third parent has to die. No one who actually lives in these situations is confused as to who's who.

We lived with my grandparents as children and while again, we loved them very much and they watched and cared for us like parents... The relationship is fundamentally different.

Even without a multigenerational household, there are plenty of American families that rely on grandparents for regular support/babysitting. I don't know how we would have managed our kids without a standing one-night-a-week date night.

Why stop at three? The saying goes, "it takes a village." Would be nice to see a resurgence of this instead of the insane isolation of suburban atomic families.

But still talking to each other, and to other outer circle friends who are not close by. So at least there's that.

Did you ever read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress? They have the concept of a "line marriage" where a marriage keeps going by marrying more people into the marriage. So you can have a married group that have been married for more than a generation.

> Does every stable relationship involve sexual aspects?

Not generally. But creating a child necessarily involves creating a stable biological relationship primarily with two other people.

Most people across history think the biological circumstances that bring us into the world are spiritually important and making the triangle between mother-father-child healthy is good for children.

For better or worse, people care their genetic material. We can either choose to create a society that makes the best of this, or we can try to suppress it and convince people that it doesn't matter.

And yes I know that surrogacy exists. But that's a side argument that opens up a lot more questions and I don't think it really changes the fundamentals.

Or more to the point, lean heavily into "it takes a village to raise a child".

What that means is that it takes parents and extended family and the close-knit community you'd find from a church and from schools, for example. Millions of people do this today. It's odd to see people think this is a revelation or something.

I'd agree and my comment is more of a critique on the evolution of American society leading away from community building. Whether it be subtle things like suburban homes with giant privacy fences or larger topics like the affordability of housing to be able stay in the community you grew up in.

I'd much rather see policies towards solving these problems versus one that has the government getting in the middle of my marriage or parenting.

Serious answer - because it's not been tried on a major scale. Maybe it has worked for a handful of cases, but the models which were tried and worked to various extent at scale were: a) "village" - multigenerational joint families taking care of all the kids together, b) nuclear family - where moms stayed at home, c) nuclear family - where both parents are working and outsource child rearing to nannies and daycares.

If three-parent scenario is tried at a larger scale and if it works with small tweaks to our social contract, then why not?

Because 3 is a poor psychological, practical, and emotianal fit for most people. Probably kids, as well.

Alloparenting is great, but 3 parents running the same household would be a nightmare in most cases.

Given the rising costs of housing/living, it's going to take 3-4 working adults to fund a home before long. A 1-2 income household will become ever more of a luxury.

Eliminating ownership of homes by investors should be a policy goal.

Or we could increase supply. A very small percentage of SFHs is owned by investors and those are still red out which fills a some needs that buying a home doesn't. The solution is to build, build, build. That's gonna bring prices down and houses will naturally become a less attractive investment. They shouldn't be a investment object anyways, just like food shouldn't be.

We also need to be careful about what we build - it can't just be more SFH.

The ideal would be for municipally owned mid-rise apartments in mixed-use neighborhoods to become common. Vienna does this very well, but public housing has been demonized in America (and, like the lazy dad who does a chore so badly they never get asked to do it again, our federal government starved public housing support so badly that most Americans think of it as an intrinsically horrific way to live).

Just allowing the type of housing you describe to be built by anyone would probably go a long way. I think another key ingredients is smoothing out and accelerating the permitting process. Shutting down hyper-local input that drags everything out is also a must. Someone wanted to convert a bunch of SFHs across the street from me into exactly what you describe and community protests shut it down. Happens all the time. People just hate change when it's near them.

I understand that in Japan there is a set of federally defined zoning types. Some beaurocrat checks your proposal against the requirements of the zone you want to build in and you get your permit or rejection within days. It's difficult to comprehend the massive impact it would have for permitting to go from an expensive, multi-year dice roll to a mostly predictable process that takes days.

But guess who tends to have loads of money invested in property... politicians! (and their wealthy donors/supporters)

One thing I’ve wondered if why we can’t carve out social housing for families. There are reasonably priced 55+ communities in prime commuting locations, why can’t we have the same for families?

Amen to this! I aspire to have a three parent household.

Parenthood usually does have some sexual aspects.

Multigenerational households are another popular option to deal with economic challenges.

I had the same reaction, "Why stop with two?"

More than two caregivers in the form of same-household extended family has been a norm in many cultures and is probably in many cases better than the nuclear family as a norm (its, a minimum, less in danger of collapse to a single misfortune), though its a worse fit for a capitalist economy that relies on labor being a fluid (as is marriage itself, once women entered the workforce on equal terms rather than being excluded or treated as accessories of men.)