The Changing Character of Stepfamilies: Implications of Cohabitation and Nonmarital Childbearing

Abstract

Divorce, nonmarital childbearing, and cohabitation are reshaping family experience in the United States. Because of these changes, our traditional definitions of families decreasingly capture of the social units of interest. We have noted how a significant proportion of officially defined single-parent families actually are two-parent unmarried families. The present paper expands on this perspective with respect to stepfamilies. We must broaden our definition of stepfamilies to include cohabitations involving a child of only one partner, and must recognize the large role of nonmarital childbearing in the creation of stepfamilies. We find that cohabitation and nonmarital childbearing have been important aspects of stepfamily experience for at least two decades, and that this is increasingly so. To define stepfamilies only in terms of marriage clearly underestimates both the level and the trend in stepfamily experience: when cohabitation is taken into account, about two-fifths of all women and 30% of all children are likely to spend some time in a stepfamily.

Cohabitation and children's living arrangements

“…In doing so, we misrepresent the experience of children who live with their father or other relatives during childhood. Earlier studies have repeatedly demonstrated the robustness of this procedure (Bumpass, Raley, and Sweet 1995;Bumpass and Sweet 1989;Raley and Wildsmith 2001). Table 1 compares the background characteristics of the NSFG V and NSFG VI (female) samples-here, as elsewhere, the estimates are weighted (see 3.2).…”

The institutionalization and pace of fertility in American stepfamilies

“…This paper has not addressed the full range of complexity among the stepfamilies, either. The analysis only applies to marriages, whereas a nontrivial proportion of stepfamilies are indeed cohabiting unions (Bumpass, Raley, and Sweet 1995). Given its higher instability and shorter duration, it is implausible that childbearing behaviors in cohabitating unions will follow the same institutionalization process.…”

Reproduction at the Margins: Migration and Legitimacy in the New Europe

“…I am grateful as well to Gunnar Andersson and Gerda Neyer for inviting me to contribute to this volume in Jan's honor, and also to them for their help and ideas. Goode, 1993;Bumpass, Raley, and Sweet, 1995;Goldscheider et al, 2000. 2. van Amersfoort, 1999, accuses European demographic scholarship of having an "ostrich" mentality, ignoring the phenomenon of immigration that is unfolding all around. However, in the 1990s, European population literature began to draw special attention to the labor contributions of international migration versus the competition immigrants could pose to longstanding residents and citizens, and later the potential costs and gains of raising their children.…”