ABSTRACT
Parental separation, divorce, remarriage, and family reconstitution have become common experiences in children's and parents' lives. The idyllic image of the two-parent, multiple-child nuclear family of the 1950s has been replaced with a more complex yet more realistic view of parenting and families in the 1990s. The intricate networks of family relationships that are formed, nurtured, and sometimes broken over the lifecourse of a family that experiences parental separation and remarriage present a complex array of risks as well as protective factors that are, in part, responsible for the wide range of individual differences seen in children's post-divorce and post-remarriage adjustment. There remains no doubt that experiencing such family changes during childhood and adolescence carries some liability for emotional and behavioral problems (Amato & Keith, 1991; Booth & Dunn, 1994; Buchanan, Maccoby, & Dornbusch, 1996). However, the magnitude of this effect and the diversity in children's adjustment forces us to consider the true complexity of individual and family psychological processes that are implicated. This aim—the exploration of multiple pathways of risk for children living in different family contexts following parental separation and family reconstitution—is the impetus for this chapter.
