Stepfather-Adolescent Relationship Quality During the First Year of Transitioning to a Stepfamily.

The general instability of child-bearing unions in the United States, combined with the tendency for parents to form new partnerships following relationship disruption, means that stepfamilies have become a central feature of the American family system. Kreider and Ellis (2011) reported that almost 8% of all U.S. children lived with a stepparent in 2009, and about 30% of U.S. children will live with a stepparent at some time before reaching adulthood (Bumpass, Raley, & Sweet, 1995). The majority of stepfamilies involve residential stepfathers (Stewart, 2007), who were the focus of the current study.This study builds on recent research on factors that are associated with the formation of close relationships between stepfathers and stepchildren (e.g., Ganong, Coleman, & Jamison, 2011; Jensen & Shafer, 2013; King, 2009; King, Thorsen, & Amato, 2014). In contrast to earlier studies that focused on differences between stepfamilies and two-parent biological families, more recent studies have focused on variation within stepfamilies. Stepfamily-focused research, like the current study, investigates processes unique to stepfamilies (e.g., the presence of stepsiblings and the number of years in a stepfamily) that may produce positive or negative stepfamily outcomes. In this study we drew on Waves I and II of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health (Add Health; http://www.cpc.unc.edu/projects/addhealth) and examined adolescents who transitioned from single-mother households to married mother-stepfather households between waves. Our goal was to use variables measured prior to the entry of stepfathers to predict the quality of stepchild-stepfather relationships during the first year after stepfamily formation.BACKGROUND AND CONCEPTUAL PERSPECTIVEUnderstanding adolescents' relationships with stepfathers in newly formed stepfamilies is a topic of particular importance, and the current study captured families when they are particularly vulnerable. Many families exhibit declines in parental attention and increases in parent-child conflict as children enter adolescence (Hetherington & Stanley-Hagan, 2000), placing children at greater risk for poor outcomes (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002). This developmental period can be a particularly difficult time for stepfamily formation and integrating stepfathers into the family, given that adolescents (and preadolescents) are more likely than young children to reject mothers' new partners (Bray & Easling, 2005; Hetherington & Jodl, 1994). The early phase of stepfamily formation is a critical time involving major changes to the family system because new roles and relationships have to be negotiated (Pryor, 2014). Early tension between adolescents and stepfathers can spill over and disrupt stepfamily functioning more generally (Bray, 1999), yet relatively little is known about the factors that affect whether adolescents accept or reject stepfathers during the first critical year of stepfamily life.When mothers form new unions, children often benefit from the economic resources provided by stepfathers (Sweeney, 2010). Although remarriage improves the standard of living of most single mothers and their children, children with stepfathers have the same risk of behavioral and emotional problems as children with single mothers (Coleman, Ganong, & Fine, 2000). The absence of positive stepfather effects has led researchers to focus less on the presence of stepfathers and more on the quality of relationships between stepfathers and stepchildren. Children's relations with stepfathers are not always close, and there is little reason to assume that children benefit when relationships with stepfathers are distant or hostile (Hetherington & Kelly, 2002). For this reason, recent studies have attempted to document the conditions under which children and stepfathers form close relationships-relationships that may benefit children and help compensate for any disadvantages associated with single-parent households. …