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  • Brave New Stepfamilies: Diverse Paths Toward Stepfamily Living
  • Shannon N. Davis
Brave New Stepfamilies: Diverse Paths Toward Stepfamily Living. By Susan D. Stewart. Sage Publications. 2007. 304 pages. $34.95 paper.

When asked to think about stepfamilies, an average person would likely conjure up images of a blended family created by divorce and remarriage, something that resembles The Brady Bunch. In her book Brave New Families: Diverse Paths Toward Stepfamily Living, Susan Stewart strives, at the most basic level, to review the current state of research on stepfamilies. More importantly, Stewart aspires to describe how stepfamily life in the United States, like family life in general, has been substantially transformed by social and demographic shifts in the past three decades. Indeed, Brave New Families challenges the traditional notions of stepfamilies, either based on the nature of the relationship between the adults in the household, residential status or demographic composition of the household.

Beginning the book with a summary of the major social, economic and demographic trends, Stewart highlights the wide variation in the subgroup of families that can be labeled as stepfamilies. Tellingly, the new stepfamilies at the forefront of change are populated by those individuals whose families we are only recently beginning to study as normative family structures. Specifically, Stewart highlights research on stepfamilies created by non-marital childbearing, cohabitation, stepfamilies spanning multiple households, black stepfamilies, stepfamilies with gay or lesbian parents, and stepfamilies with adult stepchildren. Within each chapter, research on these non-traditional stepfamilies or on these non-traditional families in general is contrasted with the more traditional stepfamilies created through divorce and remarriage. Stewart also includes many pop cultural examples of the patterns described in the chapters, providing points of connection with readers' lived experiences.

The strength of this book ironically emphasizes its limitation. Stewart notes that the book should be seen as both a reference and a catalyst for future research. As the chapters on stepfamilies created through cohabitation and multi-household stepfamilies clearly articulate, studying non-traditional stepfamilies has the potential to extend our understanding of general family processes as well as provide a unique method of examining the extent and scope of our theoretical explanations of family life. The breadth of the findings regarding cohabiting stepfamilies and multi-household stepfamilies emphasize both what is known about more "mainstream" stepfamilies and question the applicability of our current explanations for parent-child relationship quality that focus on desire to and opportunities for developing relationships. These two chapters in particular reinforce the importance of [End Page 1155] incorporating internalization of parenting expectations and interpretations by the (step)parents into our explanations of family processes.

That there is much research on cohabitation and multi-household stepfamilies allows Stewart to critique and extend previously utilized theories on stepfamilies in these chapters. The dearth of research on black stepfamilies, stepfamilies with gay and lesbian parents, stepfamilies with adult children, and stepfamilies created by non-marital childbearing becomes glaringly obvious by comparison. Stewart clearly argues for continued research on these stepfamilies. However, much of the literature included in these four chapters seems broadly, rather than directly, connected to the task at hand. At times it felt as if Stewart wanted to compensate for the lack of empirical studies on these stepfamilies by describing any general patterns known about those families and then speculate as to how those patterns would be similar or different in stepfamilies. The best example of the inclusion of more tenuously connected research findings is the chapter on black stepfamilies. The majority of the chapter is spent summarizing general findings on black families and then speculating as to how the trends may translate to black stepfamilies. Given the purpose of the book is to describe how stepfamilies have been influenced by external trends to create new types of stepfamilies, this relative lack of research is not surprising. However, the reader may be left feeling as though he or she has more questions than answers. The substantial number of additional questions makes comparisons of patterns and findings across chapters quite challenging.

Brave New Stepfamilies ends with a chapter exploring the ways practitioners and researchers could expand knowledge and policy initiatives by and through taking into consideration...

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