A step further in family life: The emergence of the blended family

Overview

Abstract (English)

As the Baby Boom drew to a close, the institution of marriage in its most traditional form also started to crumble, marking the beginning of the profound changes in conjugal and family life that characterized the final decades of the twentieth Century. The same breakthrough that permitted reliable family planning, and contributed to the plummeting birth rates of the late 1960s and early 1970s, also made possible the divorce between marriage and sexual activity. New and safer contraceptive methods paved the way for relatively risk-free cohabitation among the young, undermining the institution of marriage as the sole entry into conjugal life. Soaring divorce rates during the same period dealt a further blow, as the legal system adapted to changing ideas on marital commitment by offering an alternative to “till death do us part” as the only socially acceptable way out of an unsatisfactory marriage. Changes in conjugal behaviour have led to the transformation of family life for both adults and children. Socio-demographic studies of the adults involved tend to look at who chooses cohabitation over marriage, and why some couples are more prone to divorce than others, paying little attention to the emotional or behavioural impact on the adults involved. A great deal of research, however, has focused on the impact that these changes in adult behaviour have on the children whose lives are transformed as a result. As the process unfolded, leading from one uncharted territory to another, social scientists were never far behind. The earliest studies looked at the impact of marital breakdown on children, assuming father-absence to be responsible for any adverse effects. As more and younger children experienced their parents’ divorce, the focus shifted towards the more general consequences of living in a lone-parent family, suggesting that many of the negative outcomes previously attributed to father-absence could be explained by the relative poverty into which these families frequently fell when the parents separated (see Seltzer, 1994 and Amato, 1993, for reviews of research on children’s adjustment to divorce). Then, as these lone-parents entered new unions, sometimes with partners who also had children from earlier unions, the field of “stepfamily” research developed. It was largely concerned with understanding why stepfamilies are less stable than intact families (see Cherlin and Furstenberg, 1994; Coleman, Ganong and Goodwin, 1994). More recently, as the first generations of children growing up in these unstable families reach adulthood, it has been possible to assess the longer-term effects, with research showing that children of separated or divorced parents have an above-average risk of a number of “undesirable” conjugal and parental behaviours, such as teenage pregnancy and early marriage (Amato, 1996; Le Bourdais and Marcil-Gratton, 1998). As the number of stepfamilies grows, a development that has so far aroused less interest is the emergence of yet another family type, with parents in a stepfamily deciding to have a child together. The birth of a common child transforms the nature of the stepfamily by creating a genetic link between all family members where one did not previously exist. The first studies to take notice of this event did so in the context of research into factors contributing to the stability of stepfamilies rather than as an object of study in its own right. In the present research, our aims are to trace the emergence of the “blended family” (the term generally employed to describe stepfamilies with a common child), exploring which features of stepfamilies make them most susceptible to become blended families, and to assess how being born into a stepfamily affects the family experience and subsequent life course of the growing number of children involved.

Abstract (French)

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