To the extent that either remarried partner expects the other to relieve him or her of this baggage, the new relationship will become problematic. On the other hand, to the extent that each spouse can resolve his or her own emotional issues with significant people from the past, and manage the extremely complex structure of the present, the new relation- ship can proceed on its own merits.
Over the long haul, remarriage appears more. stressful than divorce (Ahrons, 2007), especially the father's remarriage, which underscores the impor- tance of taking a family life cycle perspective when working clinically to keep focus on the longitudinal course of family life. For poor families, separating and recoupling, often without the legal protections of marriage, become even more complex. Linda Burton and her colleagues, who have been studying such families for many years have described their brittleness and the many difficulties for families living on the edge in the changing membership and structure of recoupling (Cherlin, Burton, L. M., Hurt, T., & Purvin, 2004; Bur- ton & Hardaway, 2012; Burton & Tucker, 2009; Burton, Cherlin, Winn, Estacion, & Holder-Taylor, 2009).
As the first marriage signifies the joining of two families, so a second marriage involves the interweaving of three, four, or more families whose previous family life courses have been disrupted by death or divorce. More than half of Americans today have been, are now, or will eventually be in one or more recoupled families during their lives (Kreider, 2006). At the turn of the twenty-first century, families with stepchildren living in the house- hold constituted about 13 percent of U.S. families (Teachman & Tedrow, 2004), although, of course, this does not begin to convey the extent of recou- pled families, remarried or living together, and the number of children in multi nuclear families who spend part of their time with stepsiblings. Indeed, stepfamilies are becoming the most common familly form, and estimates are that there will soon be more multi nuclear families than first families in the United States (CDC, 2008). Estimates are that one third of children will live with a stepparent, usually a stepfather, before adulthood (Amato & Sobolewski, 2004). Half of the marriages that occur each year are remarriages. Almost 50 percent of first marriages are expected to end in divorce and the majority of divorced individuals (more men than women) remarry (Kreider, 2006). Indeed, though stepfamily relationships have been neglected in family research and are not generally as strong as first family ties, remarriage creates an enlarged pool of potential kin who may come to have very important family bonds. These numbers do not include the frequently recoupling families of the poor who can rarely afford marriage and often have changing constellations of mothers, "other- mothers" and only sometimes fathers in the picture (Burton & Hardaway, 2012).
Overall our society still does not recognize transformed and reconstituted families as part of the norm. Only recently has family research included these families and norms for forming a recoupled family are only beginning to emerge. The complexity of remarried families is reflected in our lack of positive language and kinship labels, the shifting of children's sibling positions in the new family, and society's failure to differentiate parenting from stepparenting functions. The built in ambiguity of boundaries and membership in remarried families defies simple defi- nition, and our culture lacks any established language patterns or rituals to help us handle the complex relationships of acquired family members. The kinship terms we do have, such as "stepmother," "step father." and "stepchild," have such negative connotations that they may increase the difficulties for families trying to work out these relationships. In fact, the term "step" derives from the old English word for bereavement or loss, so it is meaningful to the context in which families are reconstituted into new family constellations. Constance Ahrons calls post-divorce families "binuclear," a term that is descriptive and non stigmatizing. We have expanded this to refer to multi-nuclear families, because in recoupling there are many times when three or four or more house holds must be considered at one time.
Our society offers stepfamilies two basic models, neither of which works. The media glorifies families that act like the Brady Bunch, where every body lives together happily ever after and there are no dangling ends. The alternative narrative involves the wicked stepparents of fairy tales. Many have referred to remarried families as "blended," but, as one of Patricia Papernow's (2013) families described it, they thought they were blending but in reality it felt more like blundering. Thus, our first clinical step is to validate for stepfamilies the lack of role models and support in the paradigms of remarried families. that society has offered.
We originally chose to use the term "remarried in our work to emphasize that it is the marital bond that forms the basis for the complex rearrange- ment of several families in a new constellation, but increasingly reconstituted families are not actually marrying, or at least not marrying for a while. Still, it is the couple's bond that makes them take the trouble to go through the complexities of family reforma- tion. So we sometimes refer to them as "recoupled" families or "stepfamilies" to indicate the presence of children from past relationships as part of the remar- ried system.
Forming a remarried family is one of the most difficult developmental transitions for a family to negotiate. Giving up forever the concept of simple and clear family membership and boundaries is no easy task. It is no wonder that the unresolved losses of the previous families so often lead to premature attempts at boundary closure in a new family. In any case, car- lier losses are very likely to be reactivated by the new family formation. Indeed, Montgomery, Anderson, Hetherington, and Clingempeel, (1993) found in their longitudinal study that living together before remarriage provided a beneficial in bettween stage of adjust- ment that reduced the trauma of remarriage, just as it can in first marriages. Much therapeutic effort must be directed toward educating families about the built in complexities of the process so that they can work toward establishing a viable, flexible system that will allow them to get back on their developmental track for future life cycle phases.
It is easy to understand the wish for clear and quick resolution when one has been through the pain of a first family ending. But the instant intimacy that remarried families often hope for is impossi ble to achieve. The new relationships are harder to negotiate because they do not develop gradually, as first families do, but begin midstream, after another family's life cycle has been dislocated. Children's sibling position frequently changes, and they must cope with variable membership over several house- holds. A child may be an only child in his mother's household, but an oldest child in his father's remar- ried household, where he now has two younger step- brothers. When his mother remarries, he becomes the youngest of four with her three teenage stepchil- dren. Naturally, second families also carry the scars of first-marriage families. Neither parents, nor children, nor grandparents can forget the relationships that went before and that may still be more powerful than the new relationships. Children almost never give up their attachment to their first parent, no matter how negative that relationship was or is. Having the patience to tolerate the ambiguity of the situation and allowing each other the space and time for feel- ings about past relationships are crucial processes in forming a remarried family.
The boundary ambiguities and complexities include issues of membership, space, authority, and allocation of time. Once a remarried family is formed, it becomes forever impossible to have a clear defini- tion (if it is ever possible anyway) of who exactly is related to you how. For example, is your stepfa- ther's first cousin your cousin and are his nephews your cousins? In terms of space, do you get to have a room in your father's house when you are there only twice a week and his stepchildren are there every day? As a young adult, can you move back home with your mother and stepfather if he is the one pay- ing for the house? In terms of authority, who gets to decide whether you go to private college and your stepsiblings to public college because their parents together cannot afford private college? Who gets to make the rules for you in your father and stepmoth- er's home? And in terms of time allocation, which children get to spend more time with their father, his children or his stepchildren? An additional boundary problem arises when instant incest taboos are called for, as when several previously unrelated teenagers are suddenly expected to view each other as siblings. All these ambiguities of relationship, membership, space, authority, and time are built in and can never again be clearly defined.
In our experience, the most powerful clinical tool for helping families negotiate these complex transitions is to provide information that normal- izes their experiences. Clinically useful research findings on divorced and remarried families inte- grated in this chapter come from the work of many authors. Duberman (1975) was one of our first role models in the exploration of these issues. The lon- gitudinal research of Hetherington, Clingempeel, Montgomery, and their colleagues (Hetherington, Cox, & Cox, 1977, 1999, 2002, 2005, 2006; Hetherington-, Cox, & Cox, 1977; Hetherington & Clingempeel, 1992), carried out in a remarkably comprehensive longitudinal research on hundreds of families in a broad project over several decades (summarized in Hetherington & Kelly, 2002), has been extraordinarily helpful to us in conceptual- izing the trajectories and complex experiences of families as they evolve over the life cycle. John and Emily Visher (1979, 1988, 1991, 1996) were among the staunchest advocates for positive think- ing about stepfamilies. Connie Ahrons (Ahrons, 1981, 1994, 2005, 2007; Ahrons & Rodgers, 1987) has been expanding our understanding of divorce and remarried families for decades. Paul Glick (1984, 1989) at the Census Bureau was a generous resource to us for many years through the detailed information he had in his head about remarriage patterns. Andrew Cherlin, Frank Furstenberg, and their colleagues (Cherlin & Furstenberg, 1994; Furstenberg & Cherlin, 1994; Cherlin, 1992, 2009; Cherlin et al., 2004) have also been teaching us about the demographics of marriage, divorce, and remarriage for many years. Cliff Sager and Sager's colleagues (1983), Lillian Messinger (1978), Mary Whiteside (1978, 1982, 1989, 2006), Anne Bern- stein (1989, 1994, 1999), James Bray (Bray & Easling, 2005), Pasley and Ihinger (1995), Pasley and Ihinger-Tallman (2008), and Patricia Paper- now and her colleagues (2013) have been pioneers contributing for many years to the family therapy field's understanding of the clinical issues of remarriage. And Linda Burton and her colleagues (Burton, Purvin, & Garrett-Peters, 2009; Burton & Tucker, 2009; Burton & Hardaway, 2012; Burton et al., 2009; Cherlin et al., 2004) have carried out extraordinary ethnographic research on the cou- pling and recoupling patterns of poor families, mostly Latinas and African Americans, for more than a decade. This chapter draws on the work of these researchers and clinicians, as well as our own clinical experience over the past four decades.
Although it is extremely hard to give up the idea of the "nuclear family" by drawing a tight loy- alty boundary around household members, exclud- ing outside parents or children who reside elsewhere is neither realistic nor appropriate. It is essential to acknowledge families' actual relationships and empower them to move forward taking those reali- ties into consideration. In earlier times, when fami- lies lived in larger extended family and community enclaves, children had a whole network of adults who cared for them and helped to raise them. That is the model that helps here. Families need to develop a system with permeable but workable boundaries around the members of different households, allowing children to belong in multiple homes, to move flexibly between households and to have open lines of communication between ex-spouses, children, their parents, stepparents, grandparents, and other relatives. Indeed, extended family connections and outside connectedness may be even more impor tant for children's well-being than they are in first families.
