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Is Platonic Co-Parenting the Future of the Family?

Disillusioned with the nuclear family and apprehensive of tethering their reproductive futures to the bleak hellscape of modern love, young people are seeking a different way.

Caitlin Asher shares children with her best friend, Amanda Oelrich, and Amanda’s husband, Chris.

Caitlin Asher always knew she wanted children. But she never envisioned her family looking the way it does now.

Asher is single, but she doesn’t parent alone. She shares children with her best friend, Amanda Oelrich, and Amanda’s husband, Chris. Asher is not in a romantic relationship with the couple and never has been. Instead, the three platonically co-parent together in the same Portland, Oregon, home.

It all started when Asher and Oelrich were living as roommates in 2019. Motivated by their shared passion for helping children—Asher had interned with a child welfare organization and Amanda has an early-education degree—the women decided to become co–foster parents. “We’re both single,” Asher remembers thinking. But “we both love kids and we have the capacity to do it.”

Because the goal of foster care is primarily to reunify children with their families of origin, the pair imagined their co-parenting arrangement as short-term. “We figured we’d do it for a few years, then we’d both meet people and get married and then, you know, continue to be really good friends in separate houses,” Asher said.

In February 2020, they welcomed their first child—a baby boy—into their home; he only stayed for about a week. Then, in late March 2020, they got a call for a baby girl named Bella. Just a few months into Bella’s life, the pair were asked if they were open to adopting her. They now had to consider if they were committed to a lifetime of parenting together.

“We were very good friends. We knew each other well. We trusted that we both loved this kid and that we would commit to her forever,” Asher said. “Maybe that feels like a risk, but it is also arguably a risk in every single married relationship too.”

In March 2022, Asher and Oelrich, who was by then in a committed relationship with Chris, adopted Bella. Later, they fostered and adopted Bella’s sister, Sofia. While arrangements like Asher and Oelrich’s are still rare, the pair is not alone. Increasingly disillusioned with the traditional nuclear family model and apprehensive of tethering their reproductive futures to the bleak hellscape of modern love, growing numbers of young people are seeking a different way—not marriage nor single parenting, but the coveted “secret third thing.” For some, that thing is having kids with your friends.

There is no concrete data on the number of platonic co-parenting families in the US or the world. However, several specialty apps have sprung up over the last two years, catering to people interested in finding a platonic co-parent through the Internet, and their user numbers are on the rise. In 2020, one of the apps, Modamily, reported having 30,000 registered users; in 2025, it reported 100,000. A similar platform, CoParents, had 85,000 users in 2020; now, it boasts 150,000.

Women especially seem to be interested in exploring alternatives to the nuclear family. In a 2017 survey of 379 unmarried mothers by Lake Research Partners, 58 percent said they would be open to raising a child with someone who is not a spouse or romantic partner. More than 50 percent of unmarried mothers, unmarried women with no children under 18, and married women agreed there should be more ways to raise children with someone who is not a romantic partner.

Hannah Dees is doing it already. In 2015, she was living in Ontario, Canada, with her roommate, Andrew McAllister, and was considering becoming a single parent. She approached McAllister about being a sperm donor.

He was interested, but he wanted a role in the potential child’s life. He pulled his partner, Markus........

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