Content area
Full text
This article reviews key developments in the past decade of research on divorce, repartnering, and stepfamilies. Divorce rates are declining overall, but they remain high and have risen among people older than age 50. Remarriage rates have declined, but the overall proportion of marriages that are remarriages is rising. Transitions in parents' relationships continue to be associated with reduced child well-being, but shifting patterns of divorce and repartnering during the past decade have also reshaped the family lives of older adults. We review research on the predictors and consequences of these trends and consider what they reveal about the changing significance of marriage as an institution. Overall, recent research on divorce, repartnering, and stepfamilies points to the persistence of marriage as a stratified and stratifying institution and indicates that the demographic complexity of family life is here to stay.
Key Words: children and child development, divorce, family structure, remarriage, repartnering, stepfamilies.
In his presidential address to the Population Association of America, demographer Larry Bumpass (1990) argued that no change had so significantly altered U.S. family life as the fact that most marriages would not last a lifetime. The high and rising rates of divorce that prevailed during the 1970s and 1980s concerned family scholars for several reasons. First, many worried that the importance of marriage was waning, although continued high rates of remarriage during this period suggested an enduring attachment to marriage as an institution. A second concern was how rising divorce rates would affect the nation's youth, as parents' divorce was associated with poorer child outcomes and repartnering after divorce often creates stepfamilies. A third concern was how divorce might contribute to socioeconomic and gender-based inequality. Divorce is a stratified and stratifying life event: It varies across groups in both its likelihood of occurring and its consequences. Divorce is more common among the least educated and tends to bring more severe economic consequences for women than men-with many women not recovering economically unless they remarry. Divorce and remarriage thus become mechanisms for the transmission of inequality both within and across generations.
The family landscape has shifted in the 30 years since Bumpass penned his address. This article reviews what we have learned in the past decade about divorce, remarriage, and stepfamilies. Given the...