Step Family Transition Essay

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Step Family Transitions: How it Affects the Children
Things rarely progress smoothly when blending a family. Over half of the marriages in the United States involves remarriage. Families with step children have higher divorce rate than those without children.
Step Family Statistics
Divorced parents tend to provide less time to their children. They also provide less discipline and are less sensitive to their children, which causes stress for the child. Children with divorced parents grow up torn between two households. 41% are doing poorly, worried, underachieving, deprecating, and often angry. Many parents are unable to separate their needs from their children’s needs and often share too much of their personal life, placing the child in a precarious emotional state, vulnerable to grandiosity or to depression within what is left of their families. (Step Family Statistics, 2016). Adolescent step children are more likely to become involved with drugs, alcohol, and sexual activity due to the stress …show more content…

The divorce damages the parent-child relationship for as many 40 percent of divorced mothers (Amato and Afifi, 2006). They do not receive at home support like children who do not have divorced parents. The parents tend to show less emotional support towards the child. There is a sense of neglect because the parents are so caught up in their personal life, that they do not see their child suffering. In younger children, there is a presence of fewer toys, possibly because their parent tried moving out of their house quickly. Also there is an increase in physical punishment. Parental divorce makes it more difficult for children to trust their parents, while a decline in the closeness of the parent-child relationship mediates much of the association between parental divorce, marital discord, and offspring’s psychological wellbeing in adulthood (Amato and Afifi,

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