I think the optimal number of parents is probably two, more or less because of the reasons you mention: who has the power to make the big/final/meta decisions. On the other hand, I think that more people than usual could be involved in roles equivalent to grandparents / aunts / uncles.
When good friends with kids of similar age live close to each other, a good strategy is to put the kids together, one day at one home, another day at the other home. Kids interacting with each other will remove some burden from the parent/babysitter (yes, sometimes you have to resolve conflicts among them, but it is still a net win), and getting free time in return for extra babysitting is a great deal. Similarly to how having two kids is actually not twice as difficult as having one, because the two kids sometimes interact with each other instead of requiring your attention 100% of time, and taking two kids to a playground or making a meal for two kids is about the same work as doing it for one kid.
How much of agreement do you need to have with people in the “babysitting” roles? Seems to me that kids are able to learn that different rules apply in different places. (I see my kids behave differently at home, at kindergarten, at grandma. Kids often take an afternoon nap at kindergarten, even if it’s voluntary, while refusing to do the same at home. Grandma is more fun, but she can use the threat of “I’ll send you home if you misbehave”.) So the question is where the difference is okay, and where it is not acceptable. For example, if you don’t want your kids to get hurt, you will require the same (or higher; that’s okay) safety standards from anyone else. On the other hand, it is okay to have different toys at different places (not just in the obvious sense, but even with rules like “no watercolors allowed in this house”).
Parents can have different ideas on what is safe, how discipline should work, how much help to give, how to do food, value of different kinds of toys/screens/games, co-sleeping, night training, potty training, is it ok to microwave baby milk, what rules to have for sharing, how structured the day should be, when they’re ready to go outside alone, how to do money, what to do for childcare, when bedtime should be, what’s important in schooling, how important is predictability, how to handle various unique challenges most kids have in some form, how to do presents, when to let them try a thing, what medical treatments make sense, how much to let them make their own decisions, whether to let them ask people for things when it’s kind of rude, how much to push them, when to encourage an interest, how to build responsibility, and how to balance all kinds of tricky tradeoffs.
With my wife, we can agree on most of this easily, the major disagreements being about discipline. Yep, adding more people with more opinions would make the conflict resolution much worse.
On the other hand, grandma has different opinions on multiple things, but in practice the differences don’t matter much. If she thinks different toys are better, she is free to buy them and have them at her home. Kids sleep at home, so her opinions on bedtime are irrelevant (and when the kids sleep at her place, it’s “her place, her rules”). She thinks kids should not read and write before the school age, so she does not do these activities with them (though she was pleasantly surprised to receive an SMS written in ALL CAPS and without spaces one day); that’s perfectly okay because there are many other things to do. I suppose we do not have substantial disagreements on things that actually matter.
I suppose the lesson is that there are differences that cannot be overcome (atheism vs fundamentalist religion, anti-vaxer vs pro-vaxer, etc.), but smaller differences can be easily solved by having “different house, different rules”. Within a house, there should be an agreement on rules. The parents should be one house. This is why increasing the number of parents makes things complicated, but increasing the number of houses does not.
I think the optimal number of parents is probably two, more or less because of the reasons you mention: who has the power to make the big/final/meta decisions. On the other hand, I think that more people than usual could be involved in roles equivalent to grandparents / aunts / uncles.
When good friends with kids of similar age live close to each other, a good strategy is to put the kids together, one day at one home, another day at the other home. Kids interacting with each other will remove some burden from the parent/babysitter (yes, sometimes you have to resolve conflicts among them, but it is still a net win), and getting free time in return for extra babysitting is a great deal. Similarly to how having two kids is actually not twice as difficult as having one, because the two kids sometimes interact with each other instead of requiring your attention 100% of time, and taking two kids to a playground or making a meal for two kids is about the same work as doing it for one kid.
How much of agreement do you need to have with people in the “babysitting” roles? Seems to me that kids are able to learn that different rules apply in different places. (I see my kids behave differently at home, at kindergarten, at grandma. Kids often take an afternoon nap at kindergarten, even if it’s voluntary, while refusing to do the same at home. Grandma is more fun, but she can use the threat of “I’ll send you home if you misbehave”.) So the question is where the difference is okay, and where it is not acceptable. For example, if you don’t want your kids to get hurt, you will require the same (or higher; that’s okay) safety standards from anyone else. On the other hand, it is okay to have different toys at different places (not just in the obvious sense, but even with rules like “no watercolors allowed in this house”).
With my wife, we can agree on most of this easily, the major disagreements being about discipline. Yep, adding more people with more opinions would make the conflict resolution much worse.
On the other hand, grandma has different opinions on multiple things, but in practice the differences don’t matter much. If she thinks different toys are better, she is free to buy them and have them at her home. Kids sleep at home, so her opinions on bedtime are irrelevant (and when the kids sleep at her place, it’s “her place, her rules”). She thinks kids should not read and write before the school age, so she does not do these activities with them (though she was pleasantly surprised to receive an SMS written in ALL CAPS and without spaces one day); that’s perfectly okay because there are many other things to do. I suppose we do not have substantial disagreements on things that actually matter.
I suppose the lesson is that there are differences that cannot be overcome (atheism vs fundamentalist religion, anti-vaxer vs pro-vaxer, etc.), but smaller differences can be easily solved by having “different house, different rules”. Within a house, there should be an agreement on rules. The parents should be one house. This is why increasing the number of parents makes things complicated, but increasing the number of houses does not.