The Special Role of Stepfather

Abstract

Over time, family scholars have tended to neglect the general area of stepparenting and the specific area of stepfathering. 1 This is despite the rather high incidence of these phenomena. Two decades ago Jessie Bernard (1956) found (in her sample of 2009 respondents) that about 60 percent of both men and women who married following divorce had children by their first marriage. An even higher percentage of those who remarried following the death of a spouse had children by their first marriage. Jacobson's (1959) data indicate that eventually over five-sixths of divorced persons remarry, almost half within two years. The remarriage rate is even higher for the young divorced-the group most likely to have children subject to stepparenting. During the sixties and seventies, the remarriage rate of widowed and di-