“My child and I are a package deal”: Balancing adult and child concerns in repartnering after divorce.

Abstract

Parents who repartner after divorce must decide how to balance the potentially competing demands of their own desire for adult companionship and romance with the needs of their children for parental attention and affection. In this study, the authors assessed individual differences in divorced custodial mothers' orientation toward repartnering, characterizing it as a continuum, ranging from more child focused to more adult focused. Mothers who are more adult focused tend to be older, more educated, more likely to be employed outside the home, and exiting marriages of longer duration. In addition, using longitudinal data from in-home interviews, mothers who are more adult focused reported having lower rapport with their children, spending less time in joint activities with their children, and their children in turn reported lower rapport with their mothers. Levels of adult-focused orientation are relatively stable over time but increase when mothers become involved or interested in new partners. Using longitudinal diary data over a 2-year period, the authors demonstrated that mothers who are more child focused engage in more active management of emergent relationships in repartnered families and that adult-focused and child-focused mothers respond to different concerns. Whereas all mothers become more active in managing emergent relationships when both partner and child are resisting one another, mothers with greater child focus respond more to concerns of the child, and mothers with greater adult focus respond more to the concerns of the partner. Implications for intervention with divorced families are discussed.