The number of women who have remarried following divorce has declined for the years from 1980 to 1990.  For divorced women aged 20-24, 14.2% remarried in 1980, while only 12.5% remarried in 1990.  Re-divorce, however, is on the rise: for the same age group, 13.1% in 1990 divorced again after remarriage, compared with 8.5% in 1980.

(Source: U. S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P23-180; in the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000 [120th edition], Washington, DC, 2000, p. 66.)

"From the adolescent's perspective, it's like discovering that another layer of management (the stepparent) is being thrust between you and the boss (parent) you've reported to for twelve, fourteen, or even sixteen years. Or worse, that the business (the home) has been bought out from under you. From the teenager's perspective, remarriage can feel like a hostile takeover."

(Source: Laurence Steinberg, You and Your Adolescent, Harper Trade: 1990 in Andrews, Robert; Biggs, Mary; and Seidel, Michael, et al., eds., The Columbia World of Quotations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1996. www.bartleby.com/66/. [6 December 2001].)

Social theorists who have fostered an insouciant attitude toward parental divorce and remarriage apparently have not been paying much attention to what is happening to the children.  The plight of children in "reconstituted" families recently received attention in a study published by a team of British epidemiologists and psychiatrists in Social Science & Medicine.   Scrutinizing data from a series of annual cross-sectional surveys on the health of the English population, authors of the new study established, unsurprisingly, that "psychological morbidity" (as measured by the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire [SDQ]) showed up far less frequently in intact families than in other family configurations.  The British scholars calculate that "compared with families where two natural parents were present, children of never married lone mothers were almost three times more likely to have a high SDQ score [Odds Ratio of 2.82]."  Through further analysis, the researchers showed that the psychological disadvantage suffered by children from single-mother homes could be statistically accounted for by the poverty and the "low educational attainment" of single mothers. 

However, when the focus shifted to children in reconstituted homes, a more puzzling psychological disadvantage emerged.  Like children in single-mother homes, children living in reconstituted families had distinctively higher risk than children in intact families of suffering from psychological morbidity [Odds Ratio of 2.28].  However, explaining this elevated psychological risk proved much harder with children in stepfamilies than with children in single-mother homes.  The researchers ran the same statistical tests they had used for children in single-parent families, but in this case the researchers found that "socio-economic factors did not . . . explain the higher proportion of psychological morbidity among children with stepparents." 

 The researchers conjecture that "the increased risk of behavioural and psychological symptoms among children in 'reconstituted' families may be the consequence of a number of potential disruptions or combination of disruptions" in their family lives.    In any case, this new study fits all too well in a pattern of dismal research findings: "Many studies have documented an association between marital disruption and a wide range of deleterious effects in children.  ...[S]tudies on the effects of remarriage on children generally fail to show a beneficial effect." 

(Source:  Anne N. McMunn et al., "Children's emotional and behavioural well-being and the family environment: findings from the Health Survey for England," Social Science & Medicine 53[2001]: 423-440, emphasis added.)