In 2014, Charles Bourne, a then 43-year-old nurse living with his husband in Philadelphia in the US, started to think seriously about having kids. At first, he considered adoption. But after hearing about ‘platonic parenting’ from a colleague, he decided to set up a profile on Modamily, a website that helps connect people who want to start a family.

In September, he was contacted by another Modamily member, Nisha Nayak, a psychologist then aged 40. Throughout the next few months, Bourne and Nayak met over coffee and pizza to explore their mutual desire to become parents.

In November 2015, Nayak underwent in-vitro-fertilisation (IVF) and conceived fraternal twins. Bourne and Nayak are now proud co-parents of two-year-olds Ella and Vaughn.

Platonic parenting, also referred to as ‘co-parenting’, is a term used to define people who are not romantically involved with each other who decide to raise a child together.

Reasons to become platonic parents vary. Sometimes, it’s spurred from LGBT people who decide to get together and form a family that departs from the traditional heterosexual household, like in the case of Bourne and Nayak (who identifies as queer).

In other cases, co-parenting arrangements come from long-time friends who decide to raise a child together. That was the case for Canadians Natasha Bakht and Lynda Collins. The two colleagues and friends successfully fought to set a legal precedent in Ontario family law to allow for Collins to be recognised as parent to Bakht’s son. Canadian law only allowed ‘conjugal partne