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.
Because parent-child bonds predate the new marital bonds, often by many years, and are there- fore initially stronger than the couple bond, remar- ried families must allow for the built-in ambiguity of roles and the differential ties based on histori- cal connections. In particular, each parent needs to accept responsibility for his or her own children and not combat or compete with the other's parent-child attachments.
Previous experience with nontraditional gender roles may increase the flexibility necessary for stepfamily organization. Forming a remarried family requires a re-visioning of traditional gender roles. We must overturn completely the notion that the stepmother, just because she is a woman, should be in charge of the home, the children, or the emotional relationships of the system. Such a view fails to respect the family's history, that is, that the parent with the historical relationship with the child is the only one who can really be the primary par- ent. Traditional gender roles, requiring women to take responsibility for the emotional well-being of the family, have placed stepmothers in an unten- able position, through the expectation that she can automatically be "mother" to children with whom she has no connection (Martin, 2009). This pits her against the children's mother, a contest she is bound to lose. The traditional rules that called for women to rear children and men to earn and manage the finances do not work well in first-marriage fami- lies. They have no chance at all in a system in which some of the children are strangers to the wife.
In addition, the finances of remarried families include sources of income and expenditure that are not in the husband's power to generate or control (e.g., alimony, child support, and earnings of the ex- wife or current wife). These issues, in addition to the primacy of children's bonds to their original parents, make traditional gender roles completely inappropri- ate for remarried families.
For poor families, there are often even more difficulties: children raised with little connection to their fathers and often living with what Burton and her colleagues refer to as "othermothers," not really stepmothers, because the roles are not that stabi- lized and formalized and where children may need to deal with a series of partners their parents con- nect with, who may or may not take on parenting roles with them (Burton & Hardaway, 2012; Burton & Tucker, 2009).
