Exam 15: Remarriages and Stepfamilies

Children lower the likelihood of remarriage for both men and women, but the impact of children is greater on men's probability of remarriage.

What does it mean that the remarried family is called an incomplete institution? How does this affect the people involved in a remarriage? Is the situation changing?

Today, approximately __________ percent of all marriages involve a remarriage of one or both partners.

Stepfamilies often struggle with__________, since there are no clear guidelines regarding what responsibilities, behaviors, and emotions stepfamily members are expected to exhibit.

Because it seems almost an impossible job, the stepmother role has been described as the "stepmother ________."

Briefly explain the typical pattern of courtship for remarriages.

Adults who form stepfamilies expect a smooth and quick adjustment while children expect that the stepparent will disappear and their parents will be reunited. This is known as the _________ stage in Papernow's seven-stage model of stepfamily development.

Originally, the text points out, the term stepparent applied to

Marital happiness (or satisfaction)and marital stability are essentially the same.

Society offers members of stepfamilies an underdeveloped __________, or set of socially prescribed and understood guidelines, for relating to each other or for defining responsibilities and obligations.

Compared with other ethnicities, it is much more common for blacks and Hispanics to enter stepfamilies through

Cohabiting stepfamilies are more likely to experience __________ than are remarried stepfamilies.

Research shows that both stepmothers and stepfathers play their roles with more __________ than do biological parents-more like friends than monitoring parents.

Research on communication patterns in stepfamilies reveals several different communication patterns. In which pattern is the child's interaction with the stepparent accomplished through the child's biological or adoptive parent?

Statistics on stepfamilies are difficult to attain, and the statistics we do have are probably