Polyamory seems to be a tremendous amount of work that also requires a high degree of emotional maturity. You are balancing multiple intimate, emotional relationships with other people. I doubt that most people with the fantasy are interested in maintaining the reality for a very long time.
Critics frequently express the notion the polyamory is precisely the opposite of emotional maturity i.e. willing or being able to commit to a single other person (which inherently does mean a certain sort of sacrifice, not having a cake and eating it too style).
And yet there is much precedent for having a village raise children.
Many couples see the death of one partner, many couples lack a full and complete skill set to teach children all that they might want or need to to know, etc.
Leaving communities and extended families out of the picture is some post WWII idealised nuclear family fantasy.
It's not a fantasy in a good way: most parents (even in stable relationships) would prefer to have more support than they get. Communities are getting weaker as third spaces disappear, and people are far more likely to have to move far away from extended family (or have extended family move far away from them). The reality of the modern world is that the two parents and paid caretakers are often all that's available.
> And yet there is much precedent for having a village raise children.
But are all those other people on the same 'level' of attachment for the child, or is there a 'hierarchy'?
Further, not that having community is bad, but it can 'devolve' into tribal/clan thinking, which is probably not good for society as a whole (can lead to nepotism, which is generally highly correlated with corruption) and something the West is relatively unique in 'breaking out' of:
If having no parents is awful, single parentage is rough but barely navigable with money, and two parents seems to work pretty well… why would three parents not continue the pattern? Why shouldn’t a throuple be as much an improvement over a couple as a couple is over a single?
More people in a relationship introduces a larger surface area for interpersonal conflict. Communication is always hard even for two people, not to mention jealousy and the challenge of learning to live with another. It becomes exponentially harder when a third person is added.
That just adds to the chances of instability between parents. 2 parents is essentially a stable maximum
