World Building June, Day 07 (not economy because there is a dizzying amount of detail and my brain is not in the right place to process that kind of information rn lmao)
Kind of a continuation of the gender & sexuality prompt, here’s an example of a 4-parent family setup in Mercia.
Communal raising of children has been a part of anima society since its earliest days, and it’s one of the things that’s carried over into the post-ascension industrial age. 2-4 eggs in a clutch is most common, but anywhere from 1-6 is normal, and there are exceptional cases where clutches have been bigger than that. It’s a lot of kids to care for, hence the tendency towards having more than just the biological parents involved in the family unit.
In Karwe’s case, there are basically three pairings going on between vis parental figures. They’re not all romantically involved with all other partners, but there are families where all partners are all involved with each other. Also in this case, all three pairings have produced children; sometimes this is the case, sometimes there might only be one breeding pair.
Some families will have the siblings of parents involved in raising kids instead of/in addition to romantic partners, but this has become pretty stigmatised in modern society due to the idea being pushed that it’s borderline incestuous.
In this modern society at large, the idea of multi-parent families has been warped and twisted to the extreme: there’s pressure on parents to ensure there’s enough of them to adequately care for their children, with a 1:1 or 1:2 reference being the ideal. This, unfortunately, leads to a lot of folks winding up in strained/unhealthy/arranged relationships just to avoid social stigma. In lower classes, a low parent:child ratio is especially looked down upon, the idea being that you shouldn’t go having loads of kids if you can’t care properly for them all (on top of lower-class jobs and housing being much poorer than among higher classes). The higher classes are able to avoid this stigma and the pressure to take on multiple partners by just paying people to help with childcare.
The stigma of having too many kids and not enough caretakers leads some people to give up “excess” children for adoption, further spurred on by the idea that their child might be adopted by a higher-class family who want to avoid having to deal with a whole clutch of kids at once (because who has time for that, ew). In reality, this doesn’t happen often, because kids born to low-class parents will have that on their records, and higher classes only want high-class kids. There absolutely are exceptions, but it’s very common for higher classes to only adopt lower-class kids as charity cases/to improve their public image. At the end of the day, most of these kids end up raised at arm’s length by social workers spread far too thinly to be effective parents, and have to age out of the child welfare system.