ABSTRACT
The majority of research on stepfamilies has focused on White middle-class families. Families of all types are deeply affected by the contexts in which they are living. Contexts include time and place, employment rates and opportunities, societal attitudes to ‘nontraditional’ families, and the legal environment in which they organize their relationships at a formal level. This chapter focuses on the contexts provided by culture and race. Chinese culture is diverse, encompassing vast regions and subcultures in the Asian continent. In general, it is characterized by being comparatively both traditional and hierarchical. Japanese society has been characterized traditionally by stem families—the coexistence of three generations in one household. One impact of this is that, as with Chinese families, grandparents have a strong influence on children and their parents. It is so strong, in fact, that until recently arranged marriages outnumbered ‘love’ marriages.
