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Stepfamily Structure and Transfers Between Generations in U.S. Families

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Demography

Abstract

Unstable couple relationships and high rates of repartnering have increased the share of U.S. families with stepkin. Yet data on stepfamily structure are from earlier periods, include only coresident stepkin, or cover only older adults. In this study, we use new data on family structure and transfers in the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) to describe the prevalence and numbers of stepparents and stepchildren for adults of all ages and to characterize the relationship between having stepkin and transfers of time and money between generations, regardless of whether the kin live together. We find that having stepparents and stepchildren is very common among U.S. households, especially younger households. Furthermore, stepkin substantially increase the typical household’s family size; stepparents and stepchildren increase a household’s number of parents and adult children by nearly 40 % for married/cohabiting couples with living parents and children. However, having stepkin is associated with fewer transfers, particularly time transfers between married women and their stepparents and stepchildren. The increase in the number of family members due to stepkin is insufficient to compensate for the lower likelihood of transfers in stepfamilies. Our findings suggest that recent cohorts with more stepkin may give less time assistance to adult children and receive less time assistance from children in old age than prior generations.

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Notes

  1. See Hoerger et al. (1997) for an economic model in which the care of elderly relatives is a function of the pooled income of its family members. In theoretical models with income pooling, larger family size increases the capacity of families to help finance the care of elderly parents. This theoretical prediction of resource pooling applies, in principle, to the time that particular family members in one generation may devote to the care of those in the other generation.

  2. For example, in noncooperative, game-theoretic economic models of adult children’s provision of care to parents, adult children view caregiving as costly, and siblings’ caregiving substitutes for one’s own provision of care. This creates a “free-rider” problem in which the presence of one or more siblings reduces the incentive to provide care to parents (Byrne et al. 2009; Checkovich and Stern 2002; Engers and Stern 2002; Hiedemann and Stern 1999).

  3. An exception is Lin et al. (2017), which provided a national portrait of later-life stepfamilies in the United States.

  4. We use the term spouse/partner to refer to what PSID calls wife or “wife,” which includes legal wives and cohabiting partners of at least one year. Heads in the PSID are men except in single female–headed households and households in which the PSID sample member is a woman who has been cohabiting with her partner for less than one year.

  5. We use the term household to refer to what PSID calls a family unit, which consists of individuals who live together and are related by blood, marriage, or adoption, or who are not related but share income and expenses.

  6. The low bound of $100 is much more likely to capture financial transfers in poor families than the higher bound of $500 currently used by the Health and Retirement Study (HRS), thereby enhancing our ability to compare transfers across households that differ in family structure and economic resources (McGarry and Schoeni 1995).

  7. We retain in the sample all persons who report at least one child or parent record with a valid relationship code. We eliminate households whose head or spouse has children or parents with invalid relationship codes for every such relationship. For example, a head may report two children but identify their relationship as “other,” “don’t know,” or “refuse,” rather than “biological” or “adopted.” We also eliminate households in which the heads (and spouses, if present) report that they do not know, or refuse to answer, whether their biological parents and the biological parents of their spouse, if present, are living. For all heads and spouses with a valid report of whether at least one parent is living, we assume that parents about whom they do not know or refuse to answer are not living. For example, we code heads who report that their mother is dead and they do not know whether their father is alive as having no living parents.

  8. Attitude data suggest that respondents are more likely to report about the existence of former stepparents when relationships are closer and more enduring than when ties with former stepkin are weaker (Coleman et al. 2005; Schmeeckle et al. 2006). How to improve the quality of data on step-relationships from previous unions is an important topic for new research.

  9. We define adult ages as 18 and older, consistent with the definition of adult offspring used in the 2013 R & T. In practice, PSID heads and their spouses are almost universally older than 18 years. In 2013, three heads and one spouse were under age 18. We include these younger heads in our sample for completeness.

  10. We thank reviewers for the suggestion to include a control for coresidence. Controlling for coresidence accounts for any differences in how respondents report about transfers with coresident kin versus noncoresident kin. Our substantive conclusions are not affected by controlling for coresidence. The estimates in Tables 4 and 5 on transfers with parents are nearly identical with and without controls for coresidence. The estimates in Tables 6 and 7 on the association between the presence of stepchildren and the incidence of transfers with adult children are approximately 10 % smaller when we control for coresidence.

  11. These percentage increases are high because biological children of married couples include only the biological children of both the husband and the wife, and stepchildren include the stepchild of either the head or the wife. The increases also are high because offspring from previous unions are more likely to be age 18 or older than offspring of the current union.

  12. We do not include the corresponding estimates for single-headed households in Tables 6 and 7 because, by definition, these households do not have stepchildren in the PSID data.

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Acknowledgments

This article was presented at the 2015 annual meeting of the Population Association of America in San Diego, CA. We thank Shelly Lundberg for comments on that earlier draft. The data from the 2013 PSID Rosters and Transfers Module used in this article, as well as the analyses presented, were funded by NIA Grant P01 AG029409, and the construction of the weights was supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Grant No. 2011-6-24). The project was also supported in part by the California Center for Population Research at UCLA (CCPR), which receives core support (P2C-HD041022) from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD), and by the Duke Population Research Institute (DuPRI), which receives core support (P30AG034424) from the National Institute on Aging. We thank Sung Park and Joshua Rasmussen for their research assistance in preparing this article. Sadly, Suzanne Bianchi passed away before this article was published, but the article could not have been written without her contributions.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts Boston, Boston, MA, 02125, USA

    Emily E. Wiemers

  2. California Center for Population Research and Department of Sociology, University of California, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, USA

    Judith A. Seltzer & Suzanne M. Bianchi

  3. Institute for Social Research, Ford School of Public Policy, and Department of Economics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, 48109, USA

    Robert F. Schoeni

  4. Duke Population Research Institute and Department of Economics, Duke University, Durham, NC, 27708, USA

    V. Joseph Hotz

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  1. Emily E. Wiemers
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  2. Judith A. Seltzer
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  5. Suzanne M. Bianchi
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Correspondence to Emily E. Wiemers.

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Suzanne M. Bianchi died before publication of this work was completed.

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Wiemers, E.E., Seltzer, J.A., Schoeni, R.F. et al. Stepfamily Structure and Transfers Between Generations in U.S. Families. Demography 56, 229–260 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13524-018-0740-1

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