COMM227 Chapter Notes - Chapter 13: Stepfamily, Nuclear Family, Dialectic
1 Jun 2018
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CH 13: Renegotiating Family Communication
Remarried Couple’s Relationships
● About ¾ of all divorced people eventually remarry
● Divorce-prone personality hypothesis
○ Some people have qualities that make them likely candidates for divorce
● Training school hypothesis
○ First marriages are training grounds for relationships in subsequent marriages
○ People learn dysfunctional patterns of interaction and problem solving in their first
marriages and bring these tendencies to their new marriages
● Willingness to leave marriage hypothesis
○ People who divorce have an obvious track record for seeing divorce as a solution
to marriage problems
● Dysfunctional beliefs hypothesis
○ People enter remarriage with unrealistically high expectations
● Remarriage market hypothesis
○ Predicts that the selection of available mates is often not as good the second or
third time around
● Remarriages have been characterized as both a stressor and coping responses to the
stress of being alone
Communication and Stepfamily Relationships
● About 30% of children will live with a stepparent before reaching adulthood
● Different terms for stepfamilies
○ Remarried families
○ Blended families
○ Bi-nuclear families
○ Second families
○ Reconstituted families
● Simple stepfamily: when only one of the adults has children prior to remarriage
● Complex stepfamily: when both have children from previous relationships
○ Have a higher likelihood of redivorce
● Media negatively depicts stepfamilies and stepparents in particular, as well as portraying
unrealistically positive images of stepfamilies
● Incomplete institutionalization hypothesis
○ Stepfamilies lack guiding norms, principles, and methods of problem solving that
are enjoyed by members of nuclear families
● Reformed nuclear family
○ Stepfamilies are just like nuclear families by virtue of having two heterosexual
adults and children
Dialectic Tensions
● Parenting/non-parenting contradiction
● Openness/closedness contradiction
Document Summary
About of all divorced people eventually remarry. Some people have qualities that make them likely candidates for divorce. First marriages are training grounds for relationships in subsequent marriages. People learn dysfunctional patterns of interaction and problem solving in their first marriages and bring these tendencies to their new marriages. People who divorce have an obvious track record for seeing divorce as a solution to marriage problems. People enter remarriage with unrealistically high expectations. Predicts that the selection of available mates is often not as good the second or third time around. Remarriages have been characterized as both a stressor and coping responses to the stress of being alone. About 30% of children will live with a stepparent before reaching adulthood. Simple stepfamily: when only one of the adults has children prior to remarriage. Complex stepfamily: when both have children from previous relationships. Media negatively depicts stepfamilies and stepparents in particular, as well as portraying unrealistically positive images of stepfamilies.
