As of March 2000, there were 34,605,000 American family households with children, representing 48 percent of all U. S. households.  Of the families with children, 25,248,000 included a married couple.  That is, 73 percent of family households with children had married parents.

(Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports, P20-447, and earlier reports; and unpublished data, in U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001 [121st edition], Washington, DC, 2001, p. 53.)

"Many of today's teenagers are left to parent themselves.  If they are not from the 40 percent of young people who come from broken homes, they most likely come from homes where both parents go to work.  This makes for a home life that is often characterized by busy schedules, chronic fatigue, and weary battles of discord and dissention.  Parent-adolescent conflict occurs in all families some of the time and in some families most of the time.  Sadly, however, the latter category is growing."

(Source: Les Parrott III, "How Can We Help Hurting Adolescents," in Richard R. Dunn and Mark H. Senter III, eds., Reaching a Generation for Christ, Chicago: Moody press, 1997 p. 513.)

As stepfamilies multiply in the wake of the divorce revolution, more and more adolescents are coming to view Mom as the primary disciplinarian in the home.  The emergence of mothers as stepfamily disciplinarians comes as no particular surprise to the authors of a new study in Adolescence on adolescents' perceptions of discipline. Psychologists at Shippensburg University, the authors of the new study, scrutinized data collected from 45 adolescents, ages 15 to 19, in determining how adolescents' perceptions of discipline in intact families differs from adolescents' perceptions of discipline in stepfamilies.  Their results indicate that while "adolescents from intact families most often identified their fathers as the primary disciplinarian," things were quite different in stepfamilies: "the majority of adolescents from stepfamilies identified their mothers as the primary disciplinarian."

Citing previous research to interpret their findings, the Shippensburg scholars explain that the family role of stepfathers is typically that of "'polite strangers' who often demonstrate a 'disengaged parenting style' and make little attempt to discipline the adolescents in their stepfamilies."

In taking over as the stepfamily disciplinarian, however, mothers are certainly not going easy on their adolescent offspring-far from it.  Compared to peers from intact families, "adolescents from stepfamilies were more likely to report receiving physical punishment and to perceive having received excessive physical punishment." 

It appears that social science has just identified a new source of pain coming out of parental divorce.

(Source: Suzanne M. Morin, Carla Milito, and Nikki Costlow, "Adolescents' Perceptions of Discipline Within Intact Families and Stepfamilies," Adolescence 36[2001]: 281-288.)