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The objective of this study was to determine whether an association between coparenting trajectories and parental commitment exists five years after the birth of focal children. Situated in commitment theory, the study used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to estimate latent growth curve models to test the relationship between coparenting trajectories and commitment theory. Results show that the coparenting trajectory decreased over the four-year period, but reports remained high. Mothers who report high levels of coparenting also report being committed to the biological father, albeit commitment is low. This finding shows that parents may be dedicated to their children and constrained by the parental dyad. These findings support the hypothesis that children are constraining the parental dyad. Further, coparenting among unmarried, cohabiting parents influence parental relationships over time–substantiating the argument that a “new package deal” exists.

Social implications – If parents feel constrained to each other due to shared children, policies directed at coparenting, rather than marriage incentives and promotion, could help parents learn to negotiate their parental duties with each other to ensure that both parents are vested in their children’s lives.

This chapter reflects on the construction of transnational marital bonds over time. First, based on multi-site fieldwork carried out in 2011 and 2012 in two regions of Mexico and one of the United States, an extensive discussion on the transnational family and the construction of conjugality is presented from the point of view of two dimensions: intimacy and domestic organization in heterosexual couples with young children and conjugal unions recognized as successful. The second part discusses the same results of the study after a decade, based on contact with the same participants and an exploration of their trajectories of intimacy and family organization. The notion of life cycle and family trajectory is introduced into the discussion, arriving at paths in the definition of intimacy that discuss the romantic component initially identified and add the confessional and post-romantic components as part of the experience of geographical distance for prolonged periods of migration, in addition to aging processes.

In response to what are perceived as the negative consequences for children of family change over the past century, governments in the UK and the US have devoted substantial funds to programmes to strengthen families, but the focus of intervention in the two countries has moved in opposite directions. In the UK, financial support has shifted away from couple strengthening to parenting programmes, while in the US financial support has shifted substantially toward couple‐focused interventions. This review article summarises studies relevant to these policy choices. We present research evidence for a multidomain family risk‐child outcome model, and then describe the results of three studies using a randomised clinical trial design to examine the impact of intervention with couples on children's adaptation. The data support the hypothesis that interventions focusing on strengthening couple relationships may have a more positive impact on families and children than interventions that focus on increasing parenting skills.

In this chapter, I investigated how challenges (life events) are negotiated within families according to gender roles and their effect on marriage quality, life satisfaction, and psychological resilience in a nonclinical sample of heterosexual couples (N=159), age 23–78 (M=45.4, SD=11.2), with children (n=127) or childfree (n=32). Specifically, I accounted for the individual’s ability to share “hurt feelings” and foster intimacy within the couple, thus strengthening resilience and improving life satisfaction and hypothesized that the impact of negative life events on both relationship quality and life satisfaction could depend on the resilience levels of each partner and their ratio according to gender roles. Results confirmed the hypothesis and showed significant gender differences in the impact of negative life events on relationship quality, life satisfaction, ability to share hurt feelings, fear of intimacy, and resilience levels. Moreover, the ratio of the partner’s individual resilience affected the dependent variables differently by gender, its level interacted with the age of the couple’s first child (range: 2–54, mean: 21.4, SD: 10.4) and strongly depended on the occupation of the parents.

A robust body of scholarship has attached unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily living arrangements to a greater risk of union instability in the United States. These aspects of family life, which often co-occur, are overrepresented among disadvantaged populations, who also have an independently higher risk of union instability. Existing scholarship has modeled these family experiences as correlated events to better understand family and union instability, yet the authors assert a direct effort to test whether or how unintended childbearing differs across marital and stepfamily statuses makes important contributions to established research on relationship stability. Drawing on the 2006–2017 National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), the authors test potential moderating effects to better understand the linkages between unintended childbearing and union dissolution among 7,864 recent, higher-order births to partnered mothers via discrete-time, event history logistic regression models. Findings confirm that unintended childbearing, cohabitation, and stepfamily status are all linked with a greater risk of dissolution. However, unintended childbearing is differentially linked to instability by marital status, with unintended childbearing being associated with a higher risk of dissolution for married couples relative to cohabiting couples. Unintended fertility does not seem to increase the risk of instability across stepfamily status. Findings provide more evidence in support of selection, rather than causation, in explaining the association between unintended childbearing and union instability among higher-order births. Results suggest that among higher-order births, unintended childbearing may reflect underlying relationship issues.

The goal of this chapter is to examine (1) how children’s rapport with dating partners predicts mothers’ dating stability; (2) how characteristics of dating partners are associated with children’s problem behaviors; and (3) how mothers’ lingering attachment to the former spouse predicts relationship quality of dating relationships.

Data comes from a multimethod, multi-informant longitudinal study of postdivorce dating relationships (N = 319 mothers, n = 178 children, n = 153 dating partners). Hierarchical linear modeling techniques were used to test consequences of breakup of mothers’ dating relationships for children’s behaviors, children’s rapport with dating partners for mothers’ dating relationship stability, and mothers’ lingering attachment for quality of dating relationships.

We found that children’s rapport with dating partners was positively associated with dating breakup; more antisocial traits and drunkenness of mothers’ dating partners was positively associated with children’s problem behaviors at breakup; and lingering attachment was positively associated with poorer relationship quality with dating partners.

Because the focus of this chapter is divorced mothers with children, future studies are recommended to examine fathers’ postdivorce dating relationships. Future research should delineate dating, cohabiting, and remarried relationships after divorce.

This chapter presents empirical data examining the influence children have on mothers’ dating relationships, the influence of mothers’ dating relationships on children’s behaviors, and the effects of mothers’ lingering attachment to the former spouse on quality of mothers’ dating relationships. Information from this research is crucial for researchers and practitioners to assist mother’s and children’s postdivorce adjustment.

Stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships are increasingly common as a result of relatively high rates of divorce and remarriage and increased longevity. When relationships are close, stepgrandparents may be valuable resources for stepgrandchildren, but the relational processes salient to the development of these ties remain largely unknown. The purposes of our research were: (1) to explore the complexity of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationships, and (2) to examine processes that affected stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development.

We present results from four grounded theory projects, which were based on semistructured interviews with 58 stepgrandchildren who provided data about 165 relationships with stepgrandparents. Collectively, these studies highlighted key processes of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild relationship development operating within four distinct pathways to stepgrandparenthood – long-term, later life, skip-generation, and inherited pathways.

Stepgrandchildren’s closeness to stepgrandparents was influenced by factors such as timing (the child’s age and when in their life courses intergenerational relationships began), stepgrandparents’ roles in the life of the middle-generation parent and the quality of those relationships, whether or not the stepfamily defined the stepgrandparent as kin (e.g., through the use of claiming language), intergenerational contact frequency, and stepgrandparents’ affinity-building.

Our study furthers understanding of stepgrandparent-stepgrandchild by attending to the importance of context in examining the processes that affect intergenerational steprelationship development. Exploring processes related to intergenerational steprelationships strengthens our understanding of the benefits and challenges associated with steprelationship development. Our study also sheds light on the “new look at kinship” and the processes that inform the social construction of family in a changing familial landscape.