A Step Family A Complex Institution

Children and young people may find themselves going through a parental divorce or be part of a single parent family or they may have become part of a step family. They may

Divorce is common in the United States; remarriage is just as common. As a result many marriages result in a blended family. A family in which both of the parents have children from previous marriages. Often the blended family shares a permanent residence. Clair Cartwright and Kerry Gibson state in their 2013 report, The effects of co-parenting relationships with ex-spouses on couples in step-families, that in the United States in 2008, around 9% of households and around 12% of cohabiting households were blended families ( Teachman & Tedrow, 2008). A blended family is an excellent place to observe symbolic interaction theory.

Having a new step-family is a big change for some children, this may affect their emotional development, as they

I have been of the impression that divorce and second marriages were not common in the past. However sitting here thinking about this question, within my family and my extended family, there are number of members that have remarried and there are step families. These members are not from my generation, they are from two or three generation before mine. So the question about acceptance now and in the past is questionable. My guess is that step families were always around, now people are more open about the matter. This makes sense as to why I didn’t know about these step-family members until now. As family trends are changing, people

The film, Precious, is a powerfully charged story that delves into the family dynamics of a 16-year-old girl and her struggles to survive an onslaught of treacherous experiences. Throughout the film, the viewer is enveloped in a dramatic web of extreme situations, experienced by the main character, and those to whom she is close. The themes of domestic violence, rape, incest, drug addiction, gambling, poverty, social justice, social services, housing and education are laced together throughout the story. Particularly poignant attention is paid to various systems that help shape the experiences of the characters. The social services industry, and its associated workers, educators and administrators, set the foundation for the social themes that are highlighted by this film.

The movie I chose for my Sociological movie analysis was “Step Brothers”. The main plot line of the movie was about two families; one with a mother named Nancy at about retirement age with a thirty-nine-year-old son named Brennan who had never left home and hadn’t had many jobs, and the other family was a father named Robert of about the same age with a forty-year-old son named Dale who attended college until his junior year, but then dropped out moving back in with his dad having occasional jobs as well. Nancy attended a conference where Robert gave a speech which caused them to meet, fall in love, and get married. Nancy and Brennan moved into Robert’s home where Brennan and Dale do not “connect” and cause lots of problems. Eventually, they

Browne (2008) tells us that whilst Marriage is the usual type of relationship between Men and Women, Marriages where it’s the first time for both partners, is on a high scale decline, numbers have at least halved since 1970. This means that there are now more Reconstituted Families (families where at least one spouse will have children from a previous relationship), also knows as Step-Families. This is the fastest growing family type as now nearly half of Marriages involve a second marriage for at least one of the partners, reflecting an increase in Divorce Rates.

Chapter fourteen of the Marriage and family textbook by David Knox, covers divorce and remarriage in today’s society. It discusses how the attitudes towards divorce have changed dramatically from how it was viewed by our parents and grandparents. Not only have society’s views changed on divorce but also on the functioning roles of the family and its structure. The author also goes into how the child custody issues have changed and what things affect children who have divorcing parents. He then goes into remarriage for divorced couples and the effect it can have on the children.

Although blended families will probably never be considered “traditional”, they are becoming more common every year. Some common myths about stepfamilies are that children of divorce are considered damaged. Some children do have problems adjusting to a new family. They may feel resentment for new

The step family or blended family is becoming as common today as biological mother and father. Blended families are complicated and different ways of becoming blended families and living arrangements. Blended families are normally formed through marriages, often after divorce. The death of one parent can also lead to remarriage. (Jane: 1997)

There are, undoubtedly, a number of causes for divorce. Divorce used to be considered scandalous and immoral. This contributed to many marriages surviving despite strains. However, as divorce becomes more common, the more natural and expectable it seems. The number of divorces per year per1000 people in the U.S. has been declining since hitting our highest point in1981. (“divorce_ rate”) The United States has one of the highest divorce rates in the world. As a, couple’s relationship, marriages are more

I knew college was going to change me in many ways. Yet, after my family and I restructured our collective and individual emotional reactivity over the three years that I was away at school, I believed my work in that department was done. I thought transiting into college was difficult, however, I found myself once again unprepared for the aftershock that rocked my family once I return from school. I left college a strong, independent, mature, and differentiated person, or at least I kind of did.

In today’s society, divorce is on the rise and has been for the past few decades. As the rate increases, so does the rate of remarriage. If there is a child whose biological parents divorce and remarry, the increase of stepfamilies occurs as well. This concept is the concept of what the reading this week connects to in the stepfamilies chapter of Floyd and Morman’s (2014) book. This chapter has truly spoken to me as a child of a remarriage by the age of 8 and 14and how difficult it was growing up dealing with two different stepfamilies. Reading this chapter this week gave me some more insight into how I have communicated within my stepfamilies.

In her book The Unfinished Revolution, Kathleen Gerson argues that today, family pathways are more important than family structure. In this context, family structure refers to the organization of a family, and the way that it has been changing as a result of the gender revolution. For example, some nontraditional family structures that are explored in the book include double parent families with both parents earning, single parent families (mostly single mothers), and families with same-sex parents. Gerson argues that while family structures are not negligible, it is family pathways that are more important for the children of the gender revolution. That is to say, the children value the dynamics of their family more than the structure. They are more concerned about how well their parents are able to provide them with the necessary emotional and financial support than they are about how well their families follow a norm. For them, it is more about feeling like they’re part of a family rather than just physically being in one. Gerson emphasizes this when she explains that the people she interviewed “focused on the long-term consequences of parental choices, not on the specific form or type of home these choices produced at any one moment in time.” One important implication of this argument is the way in which the children of the gender revolution imagine their own romantic relationships unfolding. Even there, they prioritize a feeling rather than a format. For example, one

In the last 50 years or so, family life has changed becoming more diverse and complex, which has been the source of research by social scientists especially the effects of divorce on children. Marriage is no longer an institution that couples need to suffer if times are difficult, divorce is easier and cohabitation is more morally acceptable. The ideology of the nuclear family whilst not outdated is not the only type of family in which to raise children. The modern more complex family arrangements include step families, lone parents, step sibling