1. Chapter 15
New Beginnings: Single-Parent Families, Remarriages, and Blended Families

2. Chapter Outline Single-parent Families Binuclear Families Remarriage
Blended Families

3. True or False?
Second marriages are significantly happier than first marriages.

4. False
According to various studies, remarried people are about as satisfied or happy in their second marriages as they were in their first marriages.
As in first marriages, marital satisfaction appears to decline with the passage of time.

5. True or False?
Stepmothers generally experience less stress in stepfamilies than stepfathers because stepmothers are able to fulfill themselves by nurturing their stepchildren.

6. False
Women are expected to and expect to become nurturing, primary caregivers, although this role may not be adequately acknowledged or appreciated by their stepchildren.
Consequently, there are more opportunities for them to encounter stress and experience conflict with their stepchildren, and thus poorer relationships with their stepchildren may occur.

7. True or False?
People who remarry and those who marry for the first time tend to have similar expectations.

8. False
The memory of the earlier marriage exists as a model for the second marriage.
Having experienced the day-to-day living of marriage, partners in a second marriage may have more realistic expectations.

9. Three Types of Families
Today’s families mark a shift to a pluralistic family system, including families created by divorce, remarriage, and births to single women.
This new family system consists of three types:
Intact nuclear families
Single-parent families (either never married or formerly married)
Stepfamilies

10. Marriage and Remarriage
A third of Americans are expected to marry, divorce, and remarry, at some point in their lives.
In more than 40% of current marriages, one or both spouses are remarrying.
A third of all children are likely to live in a married or cohabiting stepfamily sometime before they reach adulthood.

11. Single Parent Families
Single parent families continue to grow in number.
Between 1970 and 2002, the percentage of children living in single-parent families increased from 13% to 28%.
Often, they are treated as either “broken homes” or as headed by women, especially teens, who casually bear children “out of wedlock.”
These images are based on stereotypes that misdirect us from a more accurate understanding.

12. Life Pattern for Women: Previous Generations
Marriage
Motherhood
Widowhood
Single-parent families were typically the result of widowhood rather than divorce or births to unmarried women.

13. Life Pattern for Women Today
Marriage
Motherhood
Divorce
Single parenting
Remarriage
Widowhood

14. Adolescent Mothers
Unmarried adolescent mothers are empowered to build successful families when they have emotional and financial support from their families, educational and employment opportunities, and childcare.

15. Characteristics of Single Parent Families
Creation by Divorce or Births to Unmarried Women
In 2002, 34% of all births were to unmarried women.
A divorced mother usually receives little assistance from her own kin and considerably less from her former partner’s relatives.
Our culture tends to consider divorce-induced, single-parent families as somewhat deviant.

16. Characteristics Of Single Parent Families
Significance of Ethnicity
% of children in single-parent families in 2002:
20% of Caucasian children
53% of Among African American
30% of Hispanics children
15% of Asian and Pacific Islander children

17. Characteristics Of Single Parent Families
Poverty
Unmarried single mothers are under constant economic stress.
They move as economic and living situations change.
They accept material support from kin but often at the price of receiving unsolicited advice especially from their mothers.

18. Characteristics Of Single Parent Families
Diversity of Living Arrangements
Children under age 18 are five times as likely to live with a single mother as with a single father.
In 2002, 11% of the 16.5 million children living with single mothers also lived with their mothers’ unmarried partners.
A third of the 3.3 million children living with an unmarried father also lived with their fathers’ unmarried partners.

19. Characteristics Of Single-parent Families
Transitional Form
A single mother has strong motivation to marry because of cultural expectations, economic stress, role overload, and a need for emotional security and intimacy.
The presence of social fathers, including mothers’ live-in romantic partners, may be part of the reason low-income families cohabit rather than marry.

20. Characteristics Of Single-parent Families
Intentional Single-Parent Families
Some women choose to be single parents because they have not found a suitable partner and are concerned about declining fertility.
Others choose single parenting because they don’t want their lives and careers encumbered by marriage.
Others choose it because they don’t want a husband but they do want a child.

21. Challenges in Single-parent Families
If the only adult in the household is distressed, overwhelmed, or angry, the whole house is affected.
Single parents may be less able to participate in their children’s schooling, and spend less time monitoring homework.
Parental depression, especially among custodial mothers, can affect the ability to parent effectively.
Single mothers with higher levels of life stresses and less time for themselves are more likely to transmit their anxiety to their children.

22. Benefits of Single Parent Families
Children in single-parent homes may learn more responsibility, spend more time talking with their custodial parent, and face less pressure to conform to traditional gender roles.
They may learn to help with kitchen chores, to clean up their messes, or to be more considerate.

23. Characteristics of Successful Single Parents
Accept responsibilities and challenges of single parenthood.
Parenting is the first priority.
Consistent, nonpunitive discipline.
Emphasize open communication.

24. Characteristics of Successful Single Parents
Foster individuality that is supported by the family.
Recognize of the need for self-nurturance.
Dedicated to rituals and traditions.

25. Strengths Associated With Successful Single Parenting
Parenting skills
The ability to take on both expressive and instrumental roles and traits.
Personal growth
A positive attitude toward changes in their lives and pride in overcoming obstacles.
Communication
An ability to clearly convey their feelings to their children and friends.

26. Strengths Associated With Successful Single Parenting
Family management
Ability to coordinate family, school, and work activities, meals, appointments, family time, and alone time.
Financial support
The ability to become financially self-supporting and independent.

27. The Binuclear Family
Consists of two nuclear families: the mother-headed family and the father- headed family.
The binuclear family consists of five subsystems:
former spouse, remarried couple, parent-child, sibling, and mother/stepmother-father/stepfather subsystems

28. Binuclear Family
The binuclear family is the post divorce family consisting the nuclear family that includes the mother (or ex-wife) and the one that includes the father (or ex-husband).
The creation of the binuclear family presents both rewards and challenges for its members.

29. Cohabitation
Remarital happiness is 28% lower for post divorce cohabiters than for noncohabiters.
Remarital instability is 65% greater for cohabiters than for noncohabiters.
It is impossible to determine whether post divorce cohabitation or the types of individuals who cohabit are responsible for the effect of cohabitation on remarriages.

30. Courtship and Children
The single parent’s decision to go out may lead to guilt feelings about the children.
A single parent must look at a potential partner as a potential parent.
A single parent may also have to decide whether to permit a lover to spend the night when children are in the home.

31. Remarriage Rates
More than 40% of all marriages in the United States are marriages in which at least one partner has been previously married.
Of those, 20% remarry other divorced men and women, and 22% marry never-married individuals.
One out of ten marriages is a third marriage for one or both partners.
54% of divorced women remarry within 5 years, and 75% remarry within 10 years.

32. Remarriage: Presence of Children
Children lower the probability of remarriage.
The effects are most marked when a woman has three or more children.
Most research, however, is 15 to 20 years old, and the increased incidence of single-parent families and stepfamilies may have decreased some of the negative effect of children on remarriage.

33. Remarriage: Initiator Status
Research suggests that initiators will be more likely to remarry than noninitiators.
In their decisions about seeking a divorce, initiators may factor in the prospect for reentering marriage.
They also may be better prepared emotionally than noninitiators to remarry.

34. Remarriage: Need, Attractiveness, or Opportunity?
For women, the highest remarriage rate takes place in the 20s; it declines by a quarter in the 30s and by two thirds in the 40s.
What accounts for the changing probabilities?
They may have less drive to remarry.
They are more likely to have characteristics that affect their suitability to potential partners.
The pool of eligible and available partners grows smaller as women age.

35. The Remarriage Marketplace
Three contexts from which divorced women and men might find another partner:
workplace
leisure activities
social network
Women and men who are employed and socially integrated are more likely to find a new partner.

36. Remarriage Differences from first marriage:
Partners get to know each other in the midst of major changes.
They remarry later in life.
They have different marital expectations.
Their marriage often creates a stepfamily.

37. Marital Satisfaction and Stability in Remarriage
Although marital happiness and satisfaction are similar in first and second marriages, remarried couples are more likely to divorce.
People who remarry are more likely to use divorce to resolve an unhappy marriage.
Society has not evolved norms, customs, and traditions to guide couples in second marriages.
Remarriages are subject to stresses that are not present in first marriages.

38. Structural Differences in Step Families
Almost all members have lost an important primary relationship.
One biological parent lives outside the current family.
The relationship between a parent and child predates the new marital relationship.

39. Structural Differences in Step Families
Stepparent roles are ill defined.
Children often are also members of the noncustodial parent’s household.
Children have at least one extra pair of grandparents.

40. Becoming a Stepfamily Each person experiences the process differently.
For family members, it involves seven stages.
Early stages are fantasy, immersion, and awareness.
Middle stages are mobilization and action.
Later stages are contact and resolution.

41. Strengths of Stepfamilies
Improved family functioning and reduced conflict between former spouses.
Children may gain multiple role models, more flexibility, concerned stepparents, additional siblings, additional kin, improved economic situation, and happily married parents.