•The time of the actual remarriage and forma- tion of a stepfamily, which take place as the logistics of stepfamily life are put into practice.
The emotional process at the transition to remarriage involves dealing with anxiety about investment in a new marriage and a new family; deal- ing with one's own fears and those of the new spouse and the children; dealing with hostile or upset reac- tions of the children, the extended families, and the ex-spouse; struggling with the ambiguity of the new family structure, roles, and relationships; re-arousal of parental guilt and concerns about the welfare of children; and re-arousal of the old attachment to the ex-spouse (negative or positive).
Failure to deal sufficiently with the process at each point may jam it enough to prevent remarried family stabilization from ever occurring, a problem that is reflected in the high rate of re-divorce.
The most common mistakes parents make are as follows:
1. Preoccupation with themselves and neglect of their children's experience, which follows from the conflicting life cycle tasks of parenting ver- sus new couple relationships or couple conflict
2. Treating the remarriage as an event, rather than a complex process of family transformation, which will take years
3. Trying to get children to resolve the ambi- guities of multiple loyalties by cutting off one relationship to create clarity in another.
The residue of an angry and vengeful divorce can block stepfamily integration for years or forever. The re-arousal of the old emotional attachment to an ex-spouse, which characteristically surfaces at the time of remarriage and at subsequent life cycle transitions of children, is usually not understood as a predictable process and may therefore lead to denial, misinterpretation, conflict, cutoff, and emotional reac- tivity. As with adjustment to new family structures after divorce, stepfamily integration requires a mini- mum of 2 or 3 years to create a workable new structure that allows family members to move on emotionally.
 Forming a remarried family requires a different conceptual model. When there are children, they are a "package deal" with the spouse. This is, of course, always the case with in-laws as well, but not in such an immediate way, since they do not usually move in with you! At the same time, just because you fall in love with a person does not mean you automatically love their children. So how do you take on a new family in mid-journey just because they are there and part of your spouse's life? That is often the hardest part of the bargain. The first thing is to conceptualize and plan for remarriage as a long and complex pro- cess. While more advance planning would be helpful also in first marriages, it is an essential ingredient for successful remarriage, because so many family relationships must be renegotiated at the same time: these include grandparents, in-laws, former in-laws, step-grandparents and stepchildren, half-siblings, etc. (Whiteside, 2006). The presence of children from the beginning of the new relationship makes establishing an exclusive spouse-to-spouse relation ship before undertaking parenthood impossible.
The prerequisite attitudes listed in Figure 22.1 are necessary for a family to be able to work on the developmental issues of the transition process. If, as clinicians, we find ourselves struggling with the fam- ily over developmental issues before the prerequisite attitudes have been adopted, we are probably wast- ing our efforts. For example, it is very hard for a par ent to help children remain connected to ex-in-laws who were never close or supportive unless the parent has fully embraced the new model of family. Much education and discussion may be required before a client can put into effect ideas that may seem counterintuitive, aversive, or time-consuming.
The relationship of the children and steppar- ent can evolve only over time as their connection develops and as an extension of the child's bond with the original parent. Stepparents can only gradually assume a role, hopefully friendly, as the partner of the child's parent. Unless the children are young at the time of the remarriage, the parent-and-child para- digm may never apply to the new parent. This is a life cycle reality, not a failure on anyone's part. Indeed, in the "othermother" research of Linda Burton and her colleagues, poor women are often especially resentful of raising someone else's children unless they have a special proclivity, perhaps from family of origin experiences to be a parent figure (Burton & Hardaway, 2012).
