having a one night stand where you get a girl pregnant and are tied to her for 18 years is a nightmare scenario for every man. it's even worse if it's done via IVF, because then you're not even getting sex out of it. suggesting that a man willingly has a kid with a stranger and be legally on the hook for the child is almost more depraved than the idea of women having a stranger's baby and getting pity help from someone else to help raise it
there's no part of your ideas that aren't better served by two people having a traditional relationship and then having a child once they're stable as a couple
there is no way to sell platonic co-parenting that wouldn't make any decent man's skin crawl. it breaks the core human dynamic of women trading access to their body for resources and support from a partner. it simply won't work
I think it may be a bit presumptuous to assume that platonic co-parents necessarily have to be strangers. Presumably, before both parties go through with it, they will have to get to know one another and decide whether or not they share the same goals and attitudes towards parenting. We do have examples of platonic co-parents who are definitely not strangers: one woman I read about decided to move in and have a baby with her gay best friend, for example.
I'm a little perturbed by the way that you describe romantic relationships as a woman "trading access" to her body; you make it sound no less transactional than the platonic relationships you're criticizing. Also, these aren't "my ideas". The concept I'm describing is an emerging phenomenon which I think merits some discussion, and at present, I'm more or less undecided on the topic, hence my interest in the debate.
If you get nothing else out of my post, I hope you get this bolded sentence: If you can't make a romantic relationship work, you are not ready for the much more challenging relationship of parenting. There is a reason why these things optimally go together, the skill sets are complimentary. Stop blaming externalities on your failure to find a spouse and figure out what you need to change about yourself to get what you want without screwing over the child. And that is exactly what this proposal is: shortchanging the child so you get more of what you want. If you could choose between being born to parents that love each other and two parents with a transactional relationship you would choose the first thing every single time, and its normal and good to do so. Why should you get to choose on their behalf to deprive them?
Part of what you do for your children is you model behavior for them of the same and opposite sex. Children raised by platonic co-parents will never have a model of parents that love each other, and they are going to choose very poor partners as teens/adults based on what they have seen. What you tell them has minimal impact over what they've observed over a lifetime. I think we have all seen people gravitate towards unhealthy dynamics because it felt like home. I would imagine in a platonic co-parenting family this would make them date people that don't really care about them at all, since they never saw their parents deeply love each other in any way.
I appreciate the effort you've put into your reply. You raise a lot of interesting points. I'm interested in the degree to which the nature of the parent's relationship could be informative for the children though. Firstly, the nature of intimate relationships is arguably going to be neither intuitive nor appropriate for a child to understand until they reach adolescence, prior to which, I find it debatable as to whether they would be cognizant enough to even notice that their parent's relationship is strictly platonic. Secondly, with the amount of time which is likely to elapse between generations, how much of the parent's experience is likely going to be applicable to the child?
This second point is paramount because many people nowadays aren't settling down and starting families until they're well into their 30s, and the dating culture they're having to navigate is scarcely recognizable to the one their parents came of age in. This isn't to say that there aren't some universal truths when it comes to the formation of romantic relationships, but I'd question the degree to which relationships which started 30-35 years ago could applicably inform people who are dating for the first time today.
Having never loved each other at all is more fucked up than a love that disintegrates over time (like in divorced couples). The child resulting from the union will be largely like each parent, and if you two couldn't figure out how that combination made sense together, a child is not going to be able to figure out how they make sense in the world either. If the combination made any sense you would just be a couple. Assuming you won't resent the fuck out of the other platonic co-parent for whatever issues they pass on to your offspring, and that they won't resent you, is not realistic. If you loved the other person you wouldn't mind, because love tends to encompass flaws.
You're also going to disagree with the co-parent all the time. You're both going to change considerably over the course of parenting a child, and the friction inherent in that is usually mitigated by genuinely loving each other or at least having loved each other once in the past. Without that factor it is unclear what would prevent it from becoming a war. Family courts are going to treat you both like you're retarded if you drew this up as an arrangement beforehand. When one of you does a 180 there is no real plan except to slug it out legally, which is a last resort for people who have a relationship. Everyone is stuck with the worst possible conflict resolution option.
You're probably going to argue "a lot of these things are true of parents that were in love and married and got divorced". That's true, but it wasn't anyone's intention, and believe it or not that actually counts for a lot. It is the difference between getting adopted because of unforeseen or unfortunate circumstances vs being purchased from a surrogate because a gay man decided you should exist without ever meeting your mother. Intentionally depriving someone of things is much worse than being unable to provide for them despite trying your hardest.
I haven't thus far uncovered much about what tends to happen once these sorts of arrangements break down. Anecdotally, I've heard of a couple of cases (friend-of-a-friend types) who had children with lesbians, only for the father to barely ever see the kid, although I would assume that the legal recourse available to these fathers (should they care to resort to it) would be the same as any other; at least if the child was conceived naturally.
The point about disagreements over parenting is puzzling though, because presumably, if you were selecting someone to be a co-parent as opposed to a romantic partner, then compatible philosophies regarding how the children ought to be raised would be at the top of the list of your primary considerations. I understand that people can change over time, and that this can put pressure on a relationship, but I'm not sure how this is any less true for a couple who are romantically involved. I know plenty of former spouses who once loved one another, only to now hate each other after going through a bitter divorce. Worse still, the children are often caught in the middle of this, despite not necessarily being the cause of the breakdown.
To play devils advocate here: would a platonic relationship where the raising of children was the primary motivator for said relationship be more likely to break down than a romantic relationship where the children were merely consequential?
I apply the same standards of harsh judgment to blended families, surrogates, single parents by choice, lesbians using sperm donors, and everyone else. I have seen such scenarios turn out horribly for the (now adult) children of such parents. There was a lot of encouragement at the time of the pregnancies though because people were blazing a trail or not letting misfortune stop them etc, looking back I just think how fucking stupid everyone was to assume that they found a smarter way to deal with the human condition than every other society on earth had for their entire past. Your challenges aren't actually new and your solutions aren't either, everything you could want to do has been tried and failed before. tradition persists because it works.
I don't have much personal experience with people who were raised in the alternative parenting arrangements mentioned above, although I haven't came across much research which would suggest that such arrangements are destined to be bad for the children. There is a lot of data associating negative outcomes with the children of single parents, although in a lot of these cases, I'd suggest that it's not so much the absence of one parent which is the primary issue; rather, the quality of the parents themselves.
What I'd really like to see is a comparison between people who end up as single parents due to unexpected circumstances like bereavement, and people who end up as single parents due to poor decisions in selecting a partner, because I'd guess there will be a significant difference in the typical outcomes, even if neither scenario is ideal. This may also go some way to explain the disparities in the data concerning single fathers and the data concerning single mothers; it's not necessarily that single men make better parents than single women, it's more that the children conceived by irresponsible people are overwhelmingly left to be raised by the mother.
