Beyond what meets the eye: loyalty in adolescents’ accounts of the child-stepparent relationship

Abstract

ABSTRACT The child-stepparent relationship has been shown to play an important role in adolescents’ well-being. This relationship develops within a broader family system and is shaped directly by gatekeeping processes and indirectly by children’s feelings of loyalty towards other parental figures. Nonetheless, few studies have looked at the diverse ways in which loyalty is implicated in child-stepparent relationships. This study aims to uncover the presence of loyalty towards others within child-stepparent relationships by analysing chat conversations from a youth helpline, a data source not previously used to gain understanding of stepfamily dynamics. In total, 150 family-related chat conversations with at least one reference to a stepparent were collected from the Flemish-Belgian youth helpline Awel. Thematic analysis revealed that feelings of loyalty towards other family members shape the child-stepparent relationship in various ways, but the often referred to loyalty conflict in which the stepchild feels guilty towards the parent about liking the stepparent did not appear in the data. However, we found that the presence of the stepparent creates worries about a possible change in the child–parent relationship and puts the loyalty towards the parent under pressure. This highlights the complex interconnectedness of stepfamily relations and the diverse mechanisms of loyalty.