{"id":721669,"date":"2026-07-31T21:44:10","date_gmt":"2026-07-31T21:44:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/721669\/"},"modified":"2026-07-31T21:44:10","modified_gmt":"2026-07-31T21:44:10","slug":"ask-rachel-my-daughter-wants-to-have-a-baby-with-a-man-who-has-multiple-partners","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/721669\/","title":{"rendered":"Ask Rachel: My daughter wants to have a baby with a man who has multiple partners"},"content":{"rendered":"

Do you have a sex or relationship question? Ask Rachel about it using the form below<\/a> or email askrachel@telegraph.co.uk<\/a><\/p>\n

Dear Rachel,<\/p>\n

My daughter of 32 years is thinking of having a child \u2013 but she\u2019s having a relationship with a man (same age) who wants multiple partners and multiple children. She will be one of them.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s an Elon Musk character: driven but in my opinion flawed in this one area. She\u2019s insistent she doesn\u2019t need a man in her life and points to her divorced or cheating friends. The partner would be good for her (in normal circumstances) but I\u2019m not sure she can bring children up on her own.<\/p>\n

What happens at Christmas, who does he visit? What happens if one child is ill? Who does he choose to spend time with? He\u2019s a drop-in father and I worry \u2013 bringing up children is hard enough but much harder on your own.<\/p>\n

The question is do I put up and shut up and give all I can \u2013 essentially hunker down and pick up the pieces later?<\/p>\n

– Anon<\/p>\n

Dear Anon,<\/p>\n

As soon as I read this lots of different thoughts crowded in. First, how speedy and comparatively painless it is for men to father children than it is for women to mother them.<\/p>\n

A man creates a baby in a few seconds with the release of five milligrams of fluid. In contrast, the vessel for his ejaculate is pregnant for nine months, gives birth (a life-and-death experience given the state of our maternity services<\/a>) and then the hard labour of tending the newborn, breastfeeding, weaning and potty training and the early years commences. It\u2019s full on. However far we come as a sex, we can never escape our female biology, just as however completely in legal terms we leave the EU<\/a> we can never change the geography of being located 22 miles from the coast of France and Continental Europe rather than the Eastern Seaboard of the US.<\/p>\n

Second, your daughter\u2019s chap is leveraging this difference to a degree most male partners would never dare to dream of, let alone articulate. What he is suggesting, even in the West where children are taught that families come in all shapes and sizes, is a radically indecent proposal. One that codifies, even before the event, his male irresponsibility and freedom from duty when it comes to the joys and the trials of parenthood compared to the average female, in this case, your precious daughter.<\/p>\n

As you note, Elon Musk is one outlier male who has made such a mission to \u201cSeed the World\u201d and create a bunch of mini-mes<\/a> by many different compliant and grateful women part of their brand.<\/p>\n

Musk, whatever his dark, narcissistic and complex motivations to spread his seed thus is cut from a very different cloth to more charitable, activist men \u2013 like Saint Bob of Geldof, say.<\/p>\n

Sir Bob wanted to Feed the World, he wanted us to pay greater mind to the legion of poor, starving, dispossessed babies and children in the war and drought zones of Africa. He put his money where his mouth was, and he even took in another man\u2019s child<\/a> \u2013 Tiger Lily, the progeny of his former wife Paula Yates and Michael Hutchence \u2013 rather than create a tribe of his own. Most men are more like Bob than Elon, thank goodness.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019ve been around the block long enough to know, or know of, many men who have had secret second families, or who have sired children outside the marriage, and these dogs who couldn\u2019t stay on the family porch, who couldn\u2019t resist the scent of the bitch on heat miles away, are often revealed either after their deaths (when the \u201clove children\u201d make a habit of appearing<\/a>) or by those pesky home DNA kits. The truth almost always comes out. (If you\u2019re interested in this, I recommend listening to the BBC podcast series called The Gift, reported by Jenny Kleeman).<\/p>\n

Your daughter\u2019s male friend \u2013 I\u2019m not sure he has earned the status of partner or even boyfriend \u2013 has at least done your daughter the courtesy of stating his intentions.<\/p>\n

Now, if your daughter accedes to the arrangement, she becomes not just an accessory \u2013 like some surrendered and cloistered wife to some polygynous patriarch in the Islamic world \u2013 she becomes one of his enablers. It seems to me too that unless some legal binding contract is entered into by both parties before any conception takes place your daughter is risking the security and happiness of her future child before that child is even born. Of course you are beside yourself with worry. This grandchild will be unbearably special and precious to your daughter, but will only be one of many to him. To my practical response then. The worry is justified, but is it necessary to intervene? My answer is no.<\/p>\n

If this is a risk she is prepared to take, I\u2019d do her the courtesy of taking seriously her protestations that she doesn\u2019t need a man in her life, even if that man is the father of her child. As the saying goes, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.<\/p>\n

Many young women these days become mothers without having a man<\/a> in their lives. They are lesbians, they are single mothers by choice (SMCs), they are even widows, and they get on with it.<\/p>\n

Perhaps your daughter really is independent, self-sufficient, and capable and doesn\u2019t want to be part of a boring, heteronormative, or traditional unit and sees the nuclear family of mummy and daddy and two-point-five kids as a poor substitute for the unconventional version that she wants to create. It\u2019s her life, and I don\u2019t think you can stop her if this is what she wants.<\/p>\n

Perhaps you are thinking that after she has become one of the many baby-mothers to this Musk-style monster<\/a>, single and trailing an almost fatherless child, what normal man wouldn\u2019t run a mile from her then?<\/p>\n

Well, men can be kind, accommodating, unselfish and paternal. I know at least two who\u2019ve begun relationships with women when she is either pregnant<\/a> or single-mothering another man\u2019s child. I wouldn\u2019t doomscroll through your daughter\u2019s future and write off all her chances of happiness just because she wants to bear this man\u2019s child (along with perhaps \u201cmultiple\u201d other women). It\u2019s not ideal, I agree, but it\u2019s not necessarily disastrous either.<\/p>\n

Who knows, maybe all the many mothers can all live together in some glorious hippy commune in Devon, helping each other with the childcare and cooking, gossiping and laughing and launching Instagram-friendly cottage-core businesses while this deeply annoying, self-centred stud does his thing, picks up the Starlink bill and dies lonely and alone.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d sit this one out. Your daughter has no doubt thought this through. She still wants to do it. What\u2019s the worst thing that can happen? Your daughter has a lovely baby and you have a gorgeous grandchild. Your cold objections that the father is little more than a sperm donor to his many future offspring might, I predict, melt faster than a Solero on Brighton beach when you see the little mite. Mine would!<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Do you have a sex or relationship question? Ask Rachel about it using the form below or email…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":721670,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[59,102,2281,44444,2415,7335,31552,5438,56,54,55,157732,4874],"class_list":["post-721669","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-health","tag-gb","tag-health","tag-health-and-fitness","tag-parenthood","tag-relationships","tag-sex","tag-sexual-health","tag-standard","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom","tag-us-content","tag-wellbeing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721669","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=721669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/721669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/721670"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=721669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=721669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=721669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}