Unmarried Couples with Children

8. Blended but Not the Bradys: Navigating Unmarried Multiple Partner Fertility

Chapter 8 Blended but Not the Bradys: Navigating Unmarried Multiple Partner Fertility LINDSAY M. MONTE I N THE fall of 1969, ABC television launched a new show with a somewhat daring premise for the times: a mother with three daughters who married a widower with three boys. For the next five seasons, the small stories of this large blended family would be a staple of ABC’s primetime lineup. That show, of course, was the Brady Bunch, which not only enjoyed the success of its original run, but has also been a hit in syndicated reruns ever since the end of the final season. The premise was the not new, but still novel, practice of blended families. At the time of that first episode, roughly 10 percent of all American children under eighteen were living in a remarried stepfamily (Glick 1980), though prior to the divorce boom of the late 1960s and the 1970s, most of these stepfamilies were still formed following the death of a parent (Cherlin 1992). Now the majority are formed following a divorce (Ganong and Coleman 2004), more repartnered couples are electing to live together rather than marry and one-quarter of all cohabitations now include children from a previous union (Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000). Further, research has shown that these stepfamilies are often highly unstable (Bumpass, Raley, and Sweet 1995) and confer fewer benefits to children than those formed by marriage following parental death (Manning and Lamb 2003). However, the mechanisms for these effects are unclear. This chapter provides an inductive examination of the family processes in unmarried stepfamilies. 183 Background Rising rates of cohabitation (Bumpass, Raley, and Sweet 1995), substantial growth in nonmarital childbearing (Terry-Humen, Manlove, and Moore 2001), and increases in multiple partner fertility (Carlson and Furstenberg 2006) have led to the emergence of a new kind of stepfamily, distinguished both by marital status and by high rates of multiple partner fertility. More than 30 percent of all births are now to unmarried couples (Martin et al. 2006), 60 percent of whom have other children from previous unions (Carlson and Furstenberg 2006). Further, roughly 30 percent of U.S. children will spend at least some time in a remarried or cohabiting stepfamily before reaching adulthood (Coleman, Ganong, and Fine 2000), and unmarried stepfamilies make up 25 percent of all stepfamilies in the United States (Seltzer 2000). To date, there are few studies which address unmarried couples with at least one shared child and children from previous unions, which I refer to as unmarried stepfamilies (Ganong and Coleman 2004). However, we know that multiple partner fertility is correlated with early childbearing, being African American, having less education, and histories of substance abuse or incarceration, and is three times higher among unmarried than among married parents (Carlson and Furstenberg 2006; Mincy 2002). The hazard of being in an unmarried stepfamily is thus much greater among the otherwise disadvantaged (Blank 1997). Further, a child born to a mother who has children from another union is more likely to experience parental breakup, though there are no effects on the likelihood that the parents will cohabit or marry. In contrast, in cases where the father has children from past unions, chances of cohabitation and marriage are diminished, but the likelihood of separation is unaffected (Carlson, McLanahan, and England 2004). Additionally, there is evidence that unmarried fathers, like divorced fathers, often withdraw from children after separation from the child’s mother (Carlson, McLanahan, and Brooks-Gunn 2005). The growing prevalence and apparent fragility of unmarried stepfamilies , and the advantages both children and adults glean from being in a stable, two-parent family (see, for example, McLanahan and Sandefur 1994; Waite and Gallager 2000), all mandate a more in-depth understanding of the complex family dynamics of unmarried stepparent families. The TLC3 Unmarried Stepfamily Sample The Fragile Families and Child Well-being Study (henceforth Fragile Families) and Time, Love and Cash Among Couples with Children (henceforth TLC3) dataset have many obvious strengths, such as in-depth instruments, a longitudinal design and the inclusion of fathers. However, for this analysis, TLC3 offers an additional benefit—data on a broad range 184 Unmarried Couples with Children of stepfamily forms, which permit a more complete picture of the lives of these unmarried stepfamilies than traditional research has allowed. That is, the families represented here include both couples where she brings a child into the relationship (similar to the remarried...