In our rainbow family, there are two dads and a mum – but the law in the Netherlands only recognises two of usOur daughter is very much on board with the idea that, unlike her, many other five-year-olds don’t have two fathers and a mum. “Only has one dad,” she’ll remark in a confidential tone of a newly made friend at the trampoline park or the swimming pool.My husband and I live in Amsterdam, a short cycle from our daughter’s mum, who is a longstanding mutual friend. Our daughter’s time is split between the two households. We are just one of many rainbow families in the Netherlands, where parents (often, a gay male couple and a single woman, or a lesbian couple) choose to have and raise children in constellations of more than two adults. The Dutch have a proud history of championing gay rights – it was back in 2001 that Amsterdam’s then-mayor presided over the world’s first same-sex marriages – and families such as ours have long been embraced here. And yet, from a legal point of v...
In the Netherlands, "rainbow families" with more than two parents are common, but Dutch law only recognizes a maximum of two legal parents per child, creating legal disadvantages for families with co-parenting agreements. A government commission has advised updating the definition of parenthood since 2016, but the law remains unchanged. Research estimates there are between 1,700 and 9,200 "intentional multiparent families" in the Netherlands.
