Dream of starting a family but still hung up on finding The One to do it with?
Well, you could swipe endlessly on Hinge or Tinder until your ovaries shrivel up — or you could just cut to the chase by taking the romance out of the equation.
Instead of letting one major life decision hinge on another, a growing number of baby-feverish singles are embracing platonic coparenting: when two or more people decide to have a child together (whether that involves adoption, natural or self-insemination, or surrogacy, etc.), minus the romance.
Making babies (not love)
The concept isn’t new — it’s been practiced by the LGBTQ+ community for years — but interest in the alternative family model, which first surged during the pandemic, is growing thanks to a host of new apps and websites that are helping connect strangers with the same dream of parenthood, per The New York Times.
- Modamily, a pioneering platform founded in 2011, screens users and offers tools and guidance to help users match with others who align with their values and expectations. It’s grown its user base 200%+ since 2020, from 30k to 100k in 2025.
- LetsBeParents went from 1.2k monthly active users in 2023, its first year, to 10k today.
- CoParents now has 150k registered users, up 76% since 2020.
Others include UK-based PollenTree, Danish startup aParently, and LGBTQ+-focused Pride Angel.
Beyond childrearing
The rise of platonic coparenting represents a greater cultural shift in the way people are approaching major life decisions that usually fall within the realm of romantic relationships
- Friends are buying homes together and opening shared bank accounts, and “mommunes” — single mothers living and raising their kids together — have flourished in recent years.
It’s been fueled, in large part, by some harsh economic realities (e.g., the housing crisis and rising cost of living), per Self, which have made tradition an afterthought.
- Respondents in a 2015 study listed sharing the financial burden of raising kids as one motivation for seeking a coparent online — fair, considering the average cost of raising a child from birth to age 18 in the US was nearly $400k in 2023.
Concerning yourself with traditional social norms? Not in this economy.
Family
