ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on families that experience immigration and stepfamily life simultaneously. Socially, immigrants lose significant relationships with relatives, neighbors, friends, and colleagues. Children lose classmates, familiar teachers, friends, and often grandparents, cousins, uncles, and aunts. Culturally, moving from one environment to another involves learning a new language, norms, social cues, and belief system and learning to live according to a new calendar, to enjoy different cultural events, and laugh at different jokes. Children move through the immigration cycle and the stepfamily cycle at a very different developmental pace and rhythm than adults. When a noncustodial natural parent did not immigrate with the family, the pains caused by the original loss due to the divorce may be reactivated and intensified as children blame parents and parents feel guilty for the suffering they inflict on their children. Remarriage also often involves intensified economic stress.
