Remarriage and Child Outcomes
Remarriage does not generally improve outcomes for children, despite the potential gains from both improved economic circumstances and the presence of an additional adult to help with parenting tasks. Indeed, some studies have shown children to be worse off after a parent’s remarriage. Elliott and Richards (1991) found that having a stepfather1 had a deleterious effect on children’s behaviour scores. Fergusson et al. (1986) found that, among children who had experienced a parental separation, those whose parents reconciled or whose mother remarried exhibited more behavioural difficulties than children who remained in a single-parent family. Baydar (1988) found that, although divorce was not negatively related to mothers’ reports of children’s behavioural and emotional problems, remarriage was.
It appears, then, that there is something about the complexity of family life in stepfamilies that hinders them from benefiting from the additional resources that are available when a lone mother remarries. Relationships within stepfamilies are complex and need time and goodwill on all sides to work well. Unlike the relationship between mother and stepfather, that between stepfather and stepchild is not a relationship of choice, which means that goodwill may sometimes be in short supply, at least in the early stages of establishing a stepfamily. Children are often suspicious of their mothers’ new partners and slow to open up to the benefits the new relationship might confer on them, while stepfathers are often uncertain about how to respond to the children of their new partner (Amato 1987). Typically, this uncertainty results in lower levels of involvement: as Fine et al. (1993) note, stepfathers appear to actively refrain from becoming involved with their stepchildren, engaging in both fewer positive and fewer negative behaviours. Perhaps as a result, cohesion remains lower among stepfamilies than among intact families (Pryor & Rodgers 2001). Even so, improvements in stepfamily functioning are evident over time (Amato 1987), which suggests that many families manage to master the challenges they face.