The blended family phenomenon
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- June
- 20
I don’t know if this is good news or bad news, but it’s certainly reality.
The point is that the rise in blended-family homes and situations is increasingly obvious. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this means more children are growing up having to make the adjustment, and dealing with a whole host of emotional issues that come from juggling step-parent and biological parent, step-sibling and biological sibling relationships, etc. Lord knows my girlfriend and I spend a good deal of our time working on that transition for our two boys and discussing better ways to make that smoother. It’s an imperfect—and ongoing—process, and one that more and more other parents are evidently going through.
At least that’s what I found on The Blended Family website, which cites the following stats, for which they credit the U.S. Census Bureau. At some point I’ll have to track down some research on the adaptability of children in blended family situations compared to traditional homes. I suspect it’s like anything parental: If the adults do the right thing, the kids benefit. The shocking thing to me is how often you hear of parents who don’t seem aware of the dynamics inherent in a step-family.
Either way, here are the stats:
- About 50,000 persons per month become members of stepfamilies
- 1 out of 4 children will live in a stepfamily before the age of 18
- About 1,350,000 children will become members of a stepfamily this year:
55% ~ because of remarriage after a divorce
15% ~ because of remarriage after a spouse’s death
30% ~ when a never-married mother weds - 80% of all divorced Americans remarry and 60% of these will have children from a former marriage
This entry was posted
on Friday, June 20th, 2008 at 1:08 pm by Jorge Fitz-Gibbon.
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