COPING WITH MARITAL TRANSITIONS - A FAMILY SYSTEMS PERSPECTIVE

Almost half the children born in the last decade will experience the divorce of their parents, and many of these children will also go through the changes associated with their custodial parent's remarriage. Most children initially experience their parents' marital rearrangements as stressful; however, children's responses to their parents' marital transitions are diverse and are likely to vary with the age of the child and to change over time as family members adjust to their new circumstances. This longitudinal study examined family relationships and adolescents' adjustment during the transition to remarriage. Three groups of families were studied: stepfamilies with a divorced custodial mother who was in the first months of a remarriage; families with a divorced custodial mother who had not remarried; and nondivorced families. Families were assessed three times during a 26-month period, and there were approximately equal numbers of early adolescent male and female target children in each family type. Family relationships and children's adjustment were assessed using interview measures obtained from multiple perspectives and from observational measures of family interactions in the home. This Monograph examined differences between the three family groups in children's adjustment, marital relationships, parent-child relationships, and sibling relationships as the children were moving through early adolescence and as stepfamilies were coping with a new remarriage. Authoritative child rearing was associated with positive adjustment in children in all family groups. Children in nondivorced families were more competent and exhibited fewer behavior problems than children in divorced or remarried families. Unlike the findings with younger children, few gender x family-type interactions were obtained, and no adjustment to the remarriage over the 26 months of the study was found in stepfather-stepchild relations or in the adjustment of stepchildren.