The family is an anachronism. And children are just accessories. I feel bad for the kids raised without loving, married biological parents. Because when hipsters decide to have kids in this manner, it's ultimately not with the child's best interests in mind.
At the New York Times, "Seeking to Reproduce Without a Romantic Partnership":
Rachel Hope is 5-foot-9 and likes yoga, dance and martial arts. A real estate developer and freelance writer in Los Angeles, Ms. Hope, 41, is seeking a man who lives near her, is healthy and fit, and “has his financial stuff together,” she said. Parker Williams, the 42-year-old founder of QTheory, a charity auction company also in Los Angeles, would seem like a good candidate. A 6-foot-2 former model who loves animals, Mr. Williams is athletic, easygoing, compassionate and organized.More:
Neither Ms. Hope nor Mr. Williams is interested in a romantic liaison. But they both want a child, and they’re in serious discussions about having, and raising, one together. Never mind that Mr. Williams is gay and that the two did not know of each other’s existence until last October, when they met on Modamily.com, a Web site for people looking to share parenting arrangements.
Mr. Williams and Ms. Hope are among a new breed of online daters, looking not for love but rather a partner with whom to build a decidedly non-nuclear family. And several social networks, including PollenTree.com, Coparents.com, Co-ParentMatch.com, and MyAlternativeFamily.com, as well as Modamily, have sprung up over the past few years to help them.
“While some people have chosen to be a single parent, many more people look at scheduling and the financial pressures and the lack of an emotional partner and decide that single parenting is too daunting and wouldn’t be good for them or the child,” said Darren Spedale, 38, the founder of Family by Design, a free parenting partnership site officially introduced in early January. “If you can share the support and the ups and downs with someone, it makes it a much more interesting parenting option.”
The sites present what can seem like a compelling alternative to surrogacy, adoption or simple sperm donation.
“I’ve met so many women in this same situation, who aren’t married and feel like they missed the boat,” said Dawn Pieke, 43, a sales and marketing manager in Omaha, Neb., whose daughter, Indigo, was born last October. Ms. Pieke met Indigo’s father, Fabian Blue, on a Facebook page for Co-parents.net in June 2011, not long after the end of her 10-year relationship. She wanted a baby, but feared doing it alone because, she said, “I didn’t grow up with my dad.” Rather than focusing on a love match, she decided to find someone to share both the financial and emotional stresses of child rearing.
Mr. Blue, for his part, had wanted to be a father since 2006. He had considered adoption, but “figured no one would let a single gay male adopt a child, and I didn’t have the kind of income for a surrogate,” he said. He went on Craigslist and parenting Web sites and had coffee dates with a handful of women, but “just like in any relationship there needed to be a spark and it simply wasn’t there,” he said. With Ms. Pieke, though, he said the electricity was palpable from the start. The two corresponded on Facebook and then Skype, asking each other questions about everything from religion to dating to child-rearing philosophies. By November he decided to move from Melbourne, Australia, where he was living, to Omaha.
“My twin sister was like, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Ms. Pieke recalled with a laugh. “I said, ‘No. He wants a child. I want a child. We want to meet and see if it’s anything bigger.’ ”
They first met in person on Thanksgiving 2011. “I felt like this guy was my relative or long-lost brother, but then again he was also a stranger,” Ms. Pieke said. They continued the dialogue: reading each other’s medical charts, undergoing fertility tests. He moved into a separate bedroom in her home, and, she said, four weeks later, “He handed me a semen sample, we hugged, and I went into my bedroom and inseminated myself.”
While Mr. Blue and Ms. Pieke plan on sharing parenting responsibility for Indigo equally, they never drafted any kind of legal agreement, which they both agree was unwise. “There were so many things I didn’t anticipate — like, how much should I be responsible financially? What happens if I lose a job? What happens if he does? It’s not a marriage,” she said.
Colin Weil and the mother of his 2-year-old daughter, Stella, made sure to draw up a contract and even went to couples therapy before she got pregnant. Mr. Weil, who is gay, met Stella’s mother, who asked that her name not be used, in October 2009 through a mutual friend who knew that both were single and wanted children. A courtship of sorts ensued, with strings of e-mails and endless phone calls. They met each other’s friends and families, and “decided to go for it,” said Mr. Weil, 46, director of marketing at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan. He said they spent the next few months trying to convince themselves they shouldn’t, “because it seemed crazy.” But Stella now spends one night a week with Mr. Weil and they plan to work up to more.It's a bunch of homosexuals servicing selfish and immature women.
Mr. Weil believes this type of parenting arrangement is completely logical.
“When you think about the concept of the village, and how the village was part of child rearing for so many cultures for so many thousands of years, it makes total sense,” he said. “The idea that two people — let alone one person — would do it without the village is really nutty.”
But Elizabeth Marquardt, director of the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values, a nonpartisan advocacy group in New York, vehemently disagrees. “It’s a terrible idea, deliberately consigning a child to be raised in two different worlds, with parents who did not even attempt to form a loving bond with one another,” she wrote in an e-mail. “As children of divorce will tell you, it’s very difficult to grow up in two different worlds, with your parents each pursuing separate love lives that can be increasingly complex over the course of a childhood.”
Others say she is missing the point that parenting partnerships actually spare a child the future pain of divorce. “Certainly, from a research standpoint, I don’t think having a romantic relationship is necessary to have a good co-parenting relationship,” said Sarah J. Schoppe-Sullivan, an associate professor in the Ohio State University department of human sciences. “Research shows that if parents can have a warm, cooperative, co-parenting relationship, then that’s going to be positive for the child’s development.”
Our society is getting pretty f-ked. Grow up people. It's not all about you and your needs.
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