Mothering and Recovery Ten
Blended Families
When partners separate and then establish new partnerships and families, there may be children living part-time or fulltime in the home who are not biological siblings. Additionally, the adults in the home may periodically be biologically connected to some, all, or none of the children in the home.
Yet again, estate planning, guardianship discussions and drawing up all the appropriate legal documentation for what is agreed upon is as important in these circumstances as it for all parents in all situations.
While we might think that such set ups ease the unpaid labour load, where there are at least four adults fulfilling the responsibilities of “parent,” (there can be more if there have been several rounds of separations and new families created too of course), that’s not often the case. What can be a real added stressor in these circumstances is that level of bias across all the adults and children regarding the expected inequality of effort for unpaid labour makes motherhood more burdensome in a blended family, not less so.
Perhaps you are now with a partner where the split of unpaid labour in the home is entirely equal, but when you were with your past partner, the expectation was that you managed all of the unpaid labour. That could result in your children having great difficulty in adjusting to the expectations that their mother now has true leisure time when she is unavailable to meet their every need.
Or perhaps, it’s your stepchildren who have a mother who handles all unpaid labour, and they have an expectation you fulfill that same role in the new family unit. It could be that the discrepancy is between you and your current partner and you’re working on trying to align things to be more egalitarian. The point is, there are many individuals involved and lots of family systems alongside individual levels of maturation and development and they all make unpaid labour in these settings more fraught than not.
It’s quite common that unpaid labour increases within a blended family setting for mothers. You may now be responsible for the organizing of more children and their day-to-day needs—both your own children and your partner’s children, not to mention perhaps additional children you’ve had together. There may be many more timetable challenges around where the children are staying and what school and extracurricular events are happening and the four (or more) adults involved may have very different organizing styles or expectations of who handles what when.
Wherever possible, communicate with exes together as couples and do so regularly until it’s comfortable because it certainly makes it easier to convene together to support any one child that may be dealing with a specific crisis when everyone has gotten used to group meetings already.
If there’s still a lot of bubbling animosity, or perhaps one of the parents is dealing with a crisis that makes it difficult for them to be involved in such meetings, consider hiring a family counsellor to help mediate group decision meetings. The goal is to develop understanding, boundaries and respect for the distinct rules and approaches to parenting that exist in each separate home that the children flow to and from.
The great benefit for all of the children in a blended family is that there are more adults than the original pair able to provide guidance, support and development opportunities. The great challenge is that making conflict explicit and communicating well with each other across the entire blended family is necessary for good outcomes to be realized for everyone.
For you as a mother, your focus is to keep your eye on the equal distribution of unpaid labour in the home. As there are more people involved, what should be happening is that your load is eased. If that’s not the case, then it’s the same process as listed in the partnered mothers sections above.
Non-traditional Families
The research suggests these types of families are most likely to avoid the stigma around motherhood as a role; be much more capable of splitting the unpaid labour fairly; and be more capable of dynamically changing up responsibilities, because they exhibit more advanced skills in communication and make the implicit explicit. They also have kids who, as adults, report faring better in their own relationships when compared to those from all of the above listed scenarios. [1],[2]
Non-traditional encompasses pretty much anything outside a 2-person heterosexual partnership heading up the family. There are nontraditional families where the adults are intimately involved and partnered for child raising and housework efforts and these include gay and lesbian partnerships, polycules, etc. There are also adults that are not all intimately involved with each other but have chosen to pool resources for child raising and housework efforts under the same roof. Examples of this are increasing and almost endless in variation: cohabiting couples, divorced cohabiting couples, multiple single parents, multi-generational families, siblings variously coupled and single under one roof, on it goes.
Blended families could also be classified as non-traditional, but most commonly the family unit under one roof has a 2-person heterosexual partnership heading it up. Additionally blended families are so common as to be their own traditional category now.
It should be noted that currently the data show intimate non-traditional families have better outcomes than traditional families for the division of unpaid labour and the outcomes for the children as adults. However, there is yet to be much in the way of modern studies for non-intimate non-traditional families even in terms of research on child outcomes, let alone division of unpaid labour.
There is much in the literature on communal living from the 1970s and Kibbutz communal living in Israel. Problematically, there are values and philosophies embedded in those communes that don’t have much bearing on a modern version where two or three couples decide to buy a home that’s impossible to buy as 2-person earners and live communally with their families in that setting.
But if we just take a step back for a moment, given how social primates have organized their societies for millennia, a nuclear family is recent and decidedly not traditional from that perspective.
The major advantage a mother will have in any nontraditional family is that the absorbed biases and stigma around unpaid labour in our modern world may not automatically drive the level of responsibility you are expected to assume when compared to other adults in the home.
Part Eleven Coming May 23.
Bouchard G, Lachance-Grzela M. Nontraditional families, family attitudes, and relationship outcomes in emerging adulthood. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science/Revue canadienne des sciences du comportement. 2016 Jul;48(3):238.
Bauer G. Gender roles, comparative advantages and the life course: The division of domestic labor in same-sex and different-sex couples. European Journal of Population. 2016 Feb;32:99-128.
Image in synopsis: Flickr.com: Stuart Rankin
