But what about the children?

Poly Means Many: There are many aspects of polyamory. Each month, the PMM bloggers will write about their views on one of them. Links to all posts can be found at www.polymeansmany.com. This month, our topic is "assumptions".

I've been subjected to more insults because I am non-monogamous than because I am bisexual. I even found more acceptance and understanding when I was a woman exclusively dating other women. This is clearly not because the UK is somehow more polyphobic than it is homophobic, but I think it might have something to do with the fact that I'm now a parent, and becoming a parent unlocks a whole new level of public scrutiny. The belief that children need one mother and one father was, after all, key to recent debates surrounding marriage equality, and a study of attitudes towards consensually non-monogamous romantic relationships unsurprisingly found that most people associate monogamy with better parenting and a more stable family life.

The assumption is that although it may be one thing to be non-monogamous without children, if you decide to start a family, it's really time to put all that aside and just be normal, for the sake of the children.

With that in mind, my theory about the spectrum of acceptance of alternative lifestyles runs broadly along these lines:

1. Your way of life is immoral and you disgust me (no acceptance).
2. What consenting adults do behind closed doors is okay, but don't rub my nose in it in public.
3. I have no problem with you or your way of life, but I think that all children need one mother and one father, so you shouldn't ever have children.
4. How you live, who you are or what you have chosen may or may not be for me, but it shouldn't prevent you from the same range of possible participation in society that everyone else has (full acceptance).

So when I was more visibly not heterosexual, the people around me might have only been at "level 3" acceptance, but I wouldn't have noticed. But it's harder to avoid now, because everyone has an opinion about how to parent children.

This all means that damaging assumptions about any lifestyle outside of the heteromonoganormative mould becomes much more obvious when parenting is thrown into the mix. People who will have found you simply misguided, or maybe even fascinatingly non-conformist, will flip into judging you as immoral, cruel or negligent.

Elizabeth Sheff has conducted some of the most extensive research into polyamorous parenting so far, and one of her interesting findings is that far from being confused or by their non-traditional families, children aged 5-8 with three or more parents barely seem to even notice. Children are pretty self-centred, and so how the adults in their life relate to each other isn't particularly important to them. "A 6-year-old may not think of someone as mommy's girlfriend, but think of that person as 'the one who brings Legos' or 'the one who takes me out to ice cream," Sheff explains. To think about it another way, if you had close relationships as a child with non-parental members of your biological family, how much thought did you give to the fact that your uncle was your mother's brother, or your grandmother was your father's mother? I'm willing to bet that that was far less important and interesting than the time the two of you spent together, and the bond that was personal to you. It doesn't matter if the significant adults in my daughter's life are my blood relatives, my close friends, or my romantic partners, it's going to be a while before she cares about anything other than what those people have to offer her.

The older children Sheff spoke to who were aware that their families were "different", were grateful for "having multiple adults from which to draw upon for help with math homework or to provide transportation". Again, nothing to do with how those multiple adults related to each other. You can imagine a child with a live-in grandparent, or a close family friend living next door saying the same thing. Whether or not we are monogamous is pretty unimportant to our children - it's just a flashpoint that reveals the depth of prejudice against us.

This matters whether or not you have children and whether or not you ever intend to. If people are only accepting of you and your lifestyle because you're not a parent, that basically means that they think you should be denied access to certain types of family life. They think you're a lost cause, but they want to protect the next generation from making your mistake. They want to cut you off from full participation in society. That should bother you, whether you want to access that part of family life or not, because you're not fully accepted - you're just being shielded from their bigotry. Which is why, if you'll forgive me, we should be thinking about what they think about the children.