Advice about talking to Children

[SimonSays]

My wife and I have recently had our trinogamous partner move in with us. This means the 3 of us tend to want to sleep in the same bed, however we have a 6 year old and a 10 year old who often want to either climb in bed with us (it's big enough) if they have bad dreams, or they want to come in in the morning and wake us up. We definitely don't want to kick our partner out of bed at night, we want her to be an equal part of our lives, we also don't like hiding things from our kids (we are very honest parents, we don't believe in lying to our kids). So the question we have is how have others approached this with their kids and talked about it? Mainly this is something we want to discuss with our 10 year old because he is old enough to see that she is more than "a friend" to both of us. We would like to talk to him but wonder at what level we should explain it. Do we talk about bisexuality with him? Is he old enough to take it that far?

I want him to understand that she isn't MY girlfriend, she is more than that for both of us. We want to do this in a respectful way,

[nycindie]

There are tons of threads about this. Have you tried doing a search?

You can start here:

Children and Polyamory

(lots of good stuff and different viewpoints)

[SimonSays]

I hadn't found search yet... new to the forum as of today.

That thread was very useful. We have always raised our son understanding about homosexuality because I have a lesbian sister, and we are active PFLAG members. We actually opted to talk to him tonight, while our partner is returning with more to move in. The talk went amazingly well. I do believe it is important to explain to children because my parents were swingers and thought we didn't know, and I remember "catching" them accidentally in kisses, or embraces or touches on several occasions and just being confused by it, thinking I did something wrong. Not something I wanted for my kids to go through.

The talk went really well. I am so happy that the kids are being raised in such a loving family environment. Our partner was so happy that we told our son, she really loves him, and she felt it was important for our son not to think something "Bad" was happening if he ever happened to witness a touch or something. She feels so much more comfortable just "being" now.