By Sarah Holliday

Imagine swiping not for a soulmate, but for a casual parenting partner — someone to share diaper changes, school runs, and sleepless nights, but nothing romantic. No dates, no wedding vows, just a deliberate pact to raise kids together. Welcome to “platonic co-parenting,” the trend that’s apparently all the rage come 2026. The idea is straightforward. For those single by choice (often when pursuing IVF) or by life’s twists and turns, the search shifts from finding a spouse to securing a reliable “co-parent teammate.”

Specialized apps have exploded to meet the demand, turning what was once fringe into a mainstream option. Their skyrocketing numbers are telling: One app, called Modamily, had roughly 30,000 registered users around six years ago. By 2025, that figure climbed to 100,000. LetsBeParents launched with 1,200 active monthly users in 2023 and now boasts 10,000 in 2026. CoParents has grown from 85,000 registered users in 2020 to 150,000 today.

The point behind it all? It’s hard to say. The terms often thrown around in cultural dialogue — “freedom,” “autonomy,” and the like — are not necessarily pressing in this specific conversation. From what I can tell, those concepts are alive and well here, but they’re instead masked by the guise of exploration and unconventionality — both terms deployed in a positive sense. This platonic co-parenting thing may be unorthodox, they’ll say, but it sure works for me!

So, in all actuality, what is it? What happens when parents are no longer a man and his wife, but people who meet through the internet, hang out for a few months, then decide to parent together — no romance, no marriage, no real structure? Thankfully, The New York Times’s Alyson Krueger did some digging for us. But the facts she puts forth raise a lot of questions and concerns.

Take Rave Reid, a woman in her 30s who is active on these apps. She goes on “meetings,” not dates, hunting for that “great teammate” to co-parent with. “A co-parent doesn’t need to be my romantic partner,” she told Krueger — just someone aligned in values, with “no expectations of maintaining a relationship outside the shared raising of a child (or two or three),” as Krueger further explained.

The deeper Reid ventured, the more she embraced the, shall we say, flexibility of it all. This isn’t merely a backup plan for absent partners or divorce; it’s a deliberate decoupling of parenthood from marriage. “I really feel like it let me separate two huge decisions: Who do I want to date and who do I want to parent with?” Reid said. “We put so much pressure on our partner to be everything.”

But here’s my question: why separate those two profound decisions in the first place? Biblically speaking, the delight of parenthood flows from the covenant of marriage — the profound union where a man and woman become one flesh. That sacred bond weaves romance, friendship, commitment, and sacrifice into a single, gospel-reflecting tapestry. It’s demanding work, yes — but it’s precisely that shared covenant love that infuses parenting with deeper joy and resilience. You don’t just raise children; you raise them alongside the person you’ve vowed to cherish through every season.

Yet within these stories emerges another troubling thread: the assumption that being romantic partners and best friends are somehow mutually exclusive. Krueger highlights Zachary Sahuque, who grew up amid constant arguing and vowed never to expose his own kids to the same. His solution? “Having children with someone who was his best friend, not his lover, would mitigate the risk.” He insists he’s not against marriage — just that this path is “better” for him.

Yet family policy experts like Katy Faust, founder and president of Them Before Us, have strongly pushed back on this adult-centric worldview. As she shared with me, “As per almost every kind of modern family arrangement, if you look at things from the adult perspectives, this might not just be permissible. It could be beneficial! But if you look at it from the child’s perspective, all you see is risk, instability, and loss.”

Once we start redefining family, marriage, and parenting on purely subjective terms, the boundaries dissolve. Anything becomes possible. No surprise, then, that platonic co-parenting has paved the way for polyamorous arrangements — two, three, or more “parents” sharing the load. But Faust warned that the risks compound quickly: “What happens when a woman is ‘coparenting’ with the child’s biological father, but starts to date another guy, or marries him? She has now created a household that drastically increases risks of abuse and neglect for the child. The most dangerous place a child can find themselves in America today is in the home of an unrelated man left to care for the child himself.”

And this concern doesn’t end with romantic entanglements. As Faust added, “The same risks will be present for those platonic coparenting arrangements where three people live together raising a child. Studies on polyamorous unions tell us that will not result in ‘more love for the child,’ but more risk.”

The research Krueger referred to appeared to conclude that the children in these situations “seem to be doing well and no different to other family types.” Yet I find that hard to believe. In fact, Faust pointed to a deeper, often overlooked reality: “Beyond the objective risks of involving romantic partners in your home who are not the biological parents of your child, is the sadness children experience when they have to live apart from one parent or the other. Which, even in the most ideal coparenting situations, will involve a 50% deficit.” You see, platonic co-parenting fractures the God-designed family unit — the one proven best for mothers, fathers, and especially children.

Even licensed psychologists admit, for anyone considering platonic co-parenting, counseling is essential. Not just for themselves, they’ll say, but for their future child. For those who insist it’s the way to go, they’ll claim everyone else is to blame for why their child grows up feeling different and ostracized. As Krueger noted, researchers have found “one potential sticking point,” that is, “how other people perceive them.” Anyone who adheres to the “traditional” family framework, she added, are labeled “opponents.”

Ms. Berthou, whom Krueger profiled, constantly fears misunderstanding. And yet, she also claims that because it’s 2026, “there are so many family types.” Except that’s not true. There’s one type of family, the dynamic designed by the Creator. Everything else is a façade.

Faust captured the child’s perspective with piercing clarity, stating, “Another intuitive reality is, children delight in seeing the two people they love the most, their mother and father, loving each other. Marriage researcher and parenting expert Pat Fagan noted that when a child sees their mother loving their father, they feel like their mother is loving them. But if they were to see their mother loving a boyfriend or her new spouse, it seldom produces the same circuitous love. Rather it often results in feelings of jealousy or competition.”

At face value, platonic co-parenting blends problematic elements of detached reproduction (via IVF), fragmented homes (parents often living apart), and experimental structures (multiple parents of any gender configuration). Or, as Faust concluded, “even if these co-parenting arrangements never lead to other cohabiting scenarios, platonic co-parenting elevates adult desires above child rights, needs, and well-being.”

Sarah Holliday is a reporter at The Washington Stand.