Many topics in family law, for both obvious and perhaps less than obvious reasons, garner a bit more "heat than light." As well, family law topics are comparatively under-explored empirically. A recent paper by Douglas NeJamie (Yale) and Courtney Joslin (UC Davis), The Legal Recognition of Multiparent Families: Findings from an Empirical Study, breaks from tradition as it brings data to questions surrounding the legal recognition of multiparent families.
The paper levers two datasets, including all electronically available judicial decisions (through 2022) engaging with multiparent statutes as well as "judicial decisions applying a functional parent doctrine over four decades." When it comes to the judicial decisions themselves, Figure 6 (below) makes clear that judicial activity, while growing, is an emerging trend.
Figure 6. Multiparent Decisions per Year in Multiparent Statute Dataset
While the analyses are descriptive, they nonetheless map out some important baseline trends. The authors emphasize that judicial recognition of multiparent families "is not a novel and exceptional practice that introduces new and special problems. Instead, it is a relatively common and longstanding mechanism used by courts to protect children’s existing parent-child relation ships." An excerpted abstract follows.
"Statutes in a growing number of states authorize a court to recognize more than two legal parents of a child. Commentators tend to treat both multiparent legal recognition and the multiparent families they capture as novel and cutting-edge. Through an empirical study, we show that multiparent recognition and multiparent families are neither novel nor cutting-edge. Multiparent statutes build upon and expand a longstanding legal practice of extending parental rights and responsibilities to more than two people pursuant to functional parent doctrines. Moreover, the families that multiparent statutes accommodate are common and familiar—produced by longstanding practices of divorce and remarriage, nonmarital cohabitation, and caregiving by extended family members...."