Attitudes Toward Stepfamily Relationships and Biological Relatedness: The Role of Family Experiences in Youth

• Published date: 01 July 2021
• Author: Matthijs Kalmijn
• Date: 01 July 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/fare.12547

M K Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute

(NIDI)-KNAW/University of Groningen

Attitudes Toward Stepfamily Relationships and

Biological Relatedness: The Role of Family

Experiences in Youth

Objective: This research describes the attitudes

that people have toward biological and non-

biological parenting and examines how living

arrangements during youth affect people’s atti-

tudes as adults.

Background: It is generally believed that peo-

ple have negative beliefs about nonbiological

(i.e., step) family relationships, but there is little

systematic research on such attitudes, and even

less is known about how these come about. This

topic is important given the long-term increase

in the number of stepfamilies, a trend that raises

concerns as to whether attitudes toward step-

families can become more positive over time.

Method: We used Dutchsurvey data from 5,949

respondents aged 25 to 45years with an over-

sample of people who grew up with a stepparent.

The respondents’ parents also wereinterviewed.

Attitudes were measured in the same way for

the two generations, and elaborate retrospective

Lange Houtstraat 19, 2511 CV The Hague, The Netherlands

(matthijskalmijn@gmail.com).

© 2021 The Authors. Family Relations published by Wiley

Periodicals LLC on behalf of National Council on Family

Relations.

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative

Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribu-

tion and reproduction in any medium, provided the original

work is properly cited.

Key Words: attitudes, divorce, intergenerational transmis-

sion, socialization, stepfamilies, values.

questions were asked about respondents’ living

arrangements in youth.

Results: People who grew up in a stepfamily

had more positive attitudes about stepfamily

relationships and more negative views on the

relevance of biological relatedness. This effect

was only present for stepfather and not for

stepmother families. Part of this effect was due

to parental attitudes, but even after these were

taken into account, the effect of living arrange-

ments in youth remained.

Conclusion: The general public is divided

about the relevance of biology for family rela-

tionships. Value socialization and observational

learning in youth are both important for under-

standing people’s attitudes toward stepfamily

relationships.

Implications: As the number of stepfami-

lies keeps growing, normative support for

stepparents may increase.

Many studies have examined attitudes

and beliefs toward family relationships,

including attitudes toward marriage, cohab-

itation, and divorce; beliefs about gender

roles in marriage; and ideas about child-

lessness, single parenting, and same-sex

parents (Axinn et al., 1994; Bouchard

& Lachance-Grzela, 2016; Cunningham

et al., 2005; Halman & van Ingen, 2015; Noord-

huizen et al., 2010; Sieben & Verbakel, 2013;

Thornton & Young-DeMarco, 2001; van der

Family Relations 70 (July 2021): 741–758 741

DOI:10.1111/fare.12547

742 Family Relations

Valk et al., 2008). Comparatively less research

exists about the attitudes and beliefs that people

have toward the equivalence of biological and

nonbiological family relationships. There are

vignette studies on intergenerational support

exchange showing that normative obligations

to support stepparents are weaker and more

“conditional” than obligations to support bio-

logical parents (Ganong & Coleman, 2006;

Rossi & Rossi, 1990; van Houdt et al., 2018).

There also are studies about the stereotypes

that exist regarding stepfamilies, showing that

stepfamilies are often associated with problems,

such as instability, bonding problems, jeal-

ousy, and insecurity (Claxton-Oldeld, 2008;

Claxton-Oldeld & Butler, 1998; Miller

et al., 2018; Planitz & Feeney, 2009).

Studying attitudes toward biological and non-

biological family relationships among family

members is relevant in the context of demo-

graphic change. The increase in divorce in the

Western world from the 1960s to the 1980s has

resulted in a rapid change in the nature and

number of stepfamilies (Thomson, 2014). In the

early part of the 20th century, stepfamilies were

often formed out of necessity because one of the

parents—often the mother—died young so that

the father felt compelled to remarry (van Pop-

pel et al., 2013). Currently, stepfamilies more

often are formed after divorce when a mother

who gains custody of the children nds a new

husband. Stepmothers also have become more

important with more parents opting for coparent-

ing after divorce (Nielsen, 2018). These changes

have increased the number of families in which

nonbiological parents are raising children. This

raises the question of whether beliefs about step-

family relationships have the potential to change.

Attitudes about biological relatedness also are

relevant in light of international adoption (Grote-

vant & McDermott, 2014), but this is a topic

beyond the scope of the present work.

The current article presents nationally repre-

sentative data from the Netherlands on the atti-

tudes that people aged 25 to 45 years have about

stepfamily relationships. We develop two atti-

tude scales that reect (a) whether people believe

in the assumed importance of biological rela-

tionships and (b) how people think about the

acceptability of stepparenting. Using the attitude

scales as dependent variables, we examine how

personal experiences with divorced and repart-

nered families during youth are associated with

the attitudes that people have as adults. This

question was examined based on measures about

the types of parents that people had when they

were growing up and information on the qual-

ity of parent–child relationships during youth.

Using additional data obtained directly from the

parents of the respondents, we further explore

underlying mechanisms of “stepfamily effects,”

in particular, the role of value socialization on

the one hand and observational learning on the

other.

The Netherlands is representative of the

Western European context with a moderate to

high level of divorce, relatively mixed views on

a range of moral issues, and generally positive

intergenerational relationships (Halman & van

Ingen, 2015; Hank, 2007). The Netherlands

was a strongly religious society in the rst half

of the 20th century (with a peaceful mix of

Protestant and Catholic groups), but a rapid

secularization process occurred since the 1960s

(De Graaf & Te Grotenhuis, 2008). Currently,

church membership is low and few nonmem-

bers regard themselves as religious (Halman

& Draulans, 2003). The Netherlands is not a

forerunner in the trend toward more family

complexity (Thomson, 2014), but the people we

study—born in the 1970s and 1980s—belonged

to the rst cohort in the Netherlands who

experienced parental divorce and repartnering

on a substantial scale. Of the respondents in

our study, 15.6% experienced parental divorce

before age 18 years, and of this 15.6%, 40%

lived with a stepfather and 19% lived with a

stepmother.

B  H

The goal of this research was to study how

individual experiences with (and in) stepfami-

lies affect the attitudes that people have about

the importance of biological relationships and

the acceptability of stepparents in parenting

children. Following learning and socialization

theory (Bandura, 1977; Grusec, 2011), the basic

argument of this work is that exposure to “new”

family forms may change people’s attitudes

toward this family context. Because norms and

values are formed most clearly during childhood

(Grusec et al., 2000), one could expect that the

type of family in which a person has grown up

will inuence values. There is literature that

has examined stepfamily experiences in youth

(Baxter et al., 1999; Braithwaite et al., 2001;

Jensen, 2019). This literature has focused on