In November, Rave Reid went out to dinner with a man she met on an app. Over Italian food, they spent almost three hours talking about their values and goals: What are their views on politics and religion? Where do they envision themselves living? How many children do they want, and where would they want to educate them?
“I was just being very forward,” said Ms. Reid, 33, who lives in Los Angeles and is the founder of a social wellness club.
This was not a date, but a meeting to see if they could be successful co-parents — two adults with no expectations of maintaining a relationship outside the shared raising of a child (or two or three).
“A co-parent doesn’t need to be my romantic partner,” said Ms. Reid, who would like to have a child before she turns 36. She added that she spent the dinner looking for stability and shared values with the stranger rather than flirty chemistry. “They need to be a great teammate.”
Interest in platonic co-parenting is growing, with specialty apps experiencing substantial growth over the last few years. Modamily, the app Ms. Reid is using, connects people looking to start a family through dating, sperm donation or platonic co-parenting. In 2020, the app reported having 30,000 users registered to the platform. By 2025, that number was 100,000.
By the end of 2023, the year LetsBeParents debuted, it reported having 1,200 active monthly users. Now, it has 10,000, the app said. CoParents reported having 150,000 registered users, up from 85,000 in 2020.
‘Becoming more normalized’
As she entered her 30s, Ms. Reid noticed older friends who were stressed about finding a romantic partner in tandem with their biological clock. “They want to have a baby with the next person they meet,” she said.
When she learned about co-parenting from people in her circle, the idea resonated. “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?” she said. “We put so much pressure on our partner to be everything.” (She uses a different app to date, though she is taking a break.)
She has only just begun the search for a co-parent — and is still having “thoughtful, values-based conversations” with the man she met in November — but she has been surprised by the support she’s received. “I told my mom, who is very religious and traditional, and I was bracing myself, but she was actually super open-minded,” she said.
Parenthood is complex, and some platforms encourage their users to seek out mental health providers to help them understand their reasons for pursuing this approach and to navigate the complex relationships involved. Some advise seeking legal counsel as well, for help drawing up a memorandum for the arrangement.
Amelia Demma, a New York lawyer who practices reproductive law, has begun to see more people seeking out co-parenting contracts that cover topics like “custody and visiting and financial obligations,” she said.
She added that she would not work with any co-parents who haven’t first met with a mental health professional to iron out their intentions. “My job is easier when I retain folks who are already on the right path,” she said.
Bill Petok, a licensed psychologist who lives in Baltimore and works with issues around infertility, agrees that it’s important for people who want to co-parent to seek counseling before deciding to do it — not just for themselves, but for their future child.
“They will have more things to question than children in more traditional arrangements,” he said of kids in such arrangements. “They may ask questions like, We live in the same house, but you aren’t married. Why is that? Or, Why do you live in a different house while Johnny and Bobby’s parents don’t?”
‘One size fits all doesn’t even work in ball caps’
Zachary Sahuque, 34, an environmental health and safety specialist in Price, Texas, and Amanda Lohse, 47, a high school geography teacher, matched on Modamily in 2019 and spent three months vetting each other. They talked on the phone for a week, then met up to have dinner, and then talked on the phone every night.
“I would tell her, ‘You come up with a dozen questions for me, and I’ll come up with a dozen questions for you,’ and then we would just fire questions at one another,” he said. He said they saw eye-to-eye on about 80 percent of what they talked about: religion, child-rearing and where they wanted to live.
Mr. Sahuque and Ms. Lohse now have two sons, ages 5 and 3, who were conceived through I.V.F. They live on a 52-acre ranch where they each have a house surrounded by lots of space. The kids live with her “across the pasture” and Mr. Sahuque, who travels regularly for work, sees them in between projects.
He said he grew up in a home with a lot of arguing and promised himself that he would never put his children through that. The way he saw it, he said, was that having children with someone who was his best friend, not his lover, would mitigate the risk.
The situation works for them, he said. “I am not anti-marriage, but this is better for me,” he said. “I think one size fits all doesn’t even work in ball caps.”
How the children fare
Scholars are beginning to study how children and parents fare psychologically in platonic co-parenting situations. A report published in May by academics who conducted research at the University of Cambridge looked at how children and parents in 23 families fared psychologically when the elective, nonromantic parents met online, compared with those who already knew each other.
They were clear that elective co-parenting itself is not new. “It’s been happening for a really long time, particularly among the L.G.B.T.Q.+ community,” said Vasanti Jadva, who is a psychologist and one of the report’s authors. “What is new are these websites and this new way that people are finding each other, and that’s what really intrigued us.”
Dr. Jadva, who now leads the Family, Infancy and Childhood Research Lab at City St. George’s, University of London, added that “the study was very specifically looking at how parenting works within these families, and also how the children do within these families.”
The conclusion: “The children seem to be doing well and no different to other family types.”
The researchers did find one potential sticking point, she added, which was “how other people perceive them.” Some parents reported feeling stigmatized or being selective about who they explain their situation to. “They’ve had to create their own support systems,” she said.
After all, this type of arrangement has its opponents, particularly among the growing movement advocating the birth of more children, but within traditional families.
“There is certainly a really interesting push in the prenatal space to promote more babies,” said Emma Waters, a policy analyst who studies families at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank. “What the movement misses is we shouldn’t be about more babies being born, but we should prioritize more families being formed.”
Ms. Waters said people who are co-parenting outside a romantic relationship “are placing their desires to have a child over the best interests of the child.” Pointing to a study from the Institute for Family Studies, another conservative think tank, she said that “children raised in married families by their biological parents do the best across financial, educational, behavioral and emotional stability metrics.”
Three parents is ‘easier’
Emma Berthou, 38, a TV writer who lives in Montreal, always wanted to be a mother, and believed it made more sense for her to do it with a friend than a romantic partner. She thought she had found a co-parent through a Facebook group, another popular avenue for connecting potential co-parents, but after trying to conceive for a year using at-home insemination, the two gave up.
Around the same time, a couple she had been friends with for 15 years, Florence Lemieux, an occupational therapist, and Colin Boudrias-Fournier, a comedian, offered to have a baby with her.
Ms. Lemieux, 36, said she and Mr. Boudrias-Fournier, 39, had their own hesitations about parenthood. “We both have siblings with kids,” she said. “Seeing how hard it is, especially in the first few years,” gave them pause.
But for Ms. Lemieux, adding a third parent meant sharing responsibilities, not with a babysitter or nanny, but with someone who loves her child as much as she does.
The three now have a 16-month-old son, whom Ms. Berthou conceived using sperm from Mr. Boudrias-Fournier and at-home insemination. They live in a duplex that consists of two apartments, one above the other, connected by an interior staircase. They all see their son every day but divvy up child care duties, and record any expense for the child, then split it three ways at the end of the month.
Ms. Lemieux finds that their discussions about how to raise the baby are often less intense than the ones had by her friends making those choices with a romantic partner. “It isn’t one person against another,” she said. “We have to come to an agreement with three people, and it makes the discussions easier.”
Ms. Lemieux is currently carrying their second child.
Ms. Berthou said she is constantly afraid people won’t understand the situation, but she has encountered much less confusion than she assumed she would.
It’s 2026, after all, she said, and “there are so many family types.”
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