How many parents is too few, too many, just right?

Not much study has gone into investigating what lawyers term "intentional parenting" - defining parents by whether they intend to be involved in a child's life rather than by the biological relationship. A controversial new study by family scholar Elizabeth Marquandt challenges the conventional view that "being wanted" is all that children need. In "One Parent or Five", she documents the growth of contemporary family structures with one, two, three, four, five or even more adults claiming to be parents. Her own attitude is far from optimistic: "intention alone hardly guarantees good child outcomes". The study build on an earlier one on the children of anonymous sperm donors.