ABSTRACT
Marriage, divorce, and remarriage are part of a reorganization process that entails a series of major changes in the family. This chapter reviews what is known about how marital changes affect members of the older generation, specifically in their roles as parents and grandparents. It analyzes the grandparent generation during the process of kinship reorganization after the marital changes of their children. Survey and census data, most of which report only on women, indicate that the divorce rate has peaked but remains at a high level of frequency. A grandparent’s kinship system expands when relationships with their child’s former in-laws are retained, and new relatives are added with their child’s remarriage. With widowhood or divorce, grandparents too are likely to remarry. In doing so, they potentially add another set of step and in-law relations to their networks.
