Stepfamilies and children's adjustment

Increasing numbers of children spend periods of their childhoods as members of stepfamilies a stepfamily being defined as one in which there is at least one dependent child from a previous relationship or marriage of one or both partners. Recent analyses from the Office of Population Censuses and Surveys (OPCS) indicate that one in eight dependent children will live at some stage in a family in which their birth parent has either remarried or formed a new partnership before they are 16, if current trends continue.' These changes in children's lives start early: most of the children (72%) identified in the OPCS analyses as living in stepfamilies started to do so before they were 10 years old. And the changes in family situations frequently continue as children grow up: parental separation and divorce rates are at least as high in second as in first marriages,2 and life in a single parent family is often only temporary.3 Divorce and remarriage are not static life events but part of a complex chain of transitions that involve children in a host of other potentially stressful changes in the larger social milieu in which they grow up changes in schools, neighbourhoods, in their relations with extended families and peers, as well as in their economic circumstances. There is often too the presence of stepsiblings and the birth of half siblings: OPCS studies show that 53% of stepfamilies include a child born since the couple started living together. What are the implications of these experiences for child-