Second Marriages, Blended Family Advice and Special Occasion Ceremony Ideas

Ultimate Stepfamily & Blended Family Statistics Guide

12/23/2013

NOTE: We found that Smart Stepfamilies had a lot of great data we could use and present in a clear fashion. Check out their site.

Approximately one-third of all weddings in America today form stepfamilies(demographic estimate, Deal). In 2001, 38% of all US marriages were remarriages for one or both partners (15% for both; 23% for one) (Wendy Manning, personal communication Jan 2010, National Center for Family and Marriage Research).
40% of married couples with children (i.e., families) in the US are stepcouples (at least one partner had a child from a previous relationship before marriage).
The percentage of all married couple households is 35%. (Karney, Garvan, & Thomas, 2003)
One of three Americans currently has a steprelationship of some kind and it is estimated that 50% will during their lifetime. (Larson, 1992).

More than a quarter of the people who remarry are over 50 years of age.
The divorce rate for remarried and stepfamily couples varies but is at least 60%.
Children living with two married parents in the US have a higher risk of experiencing a family breakup than do children living with two unmarried parents in Sweden.
The more parental partnerships (transitions in and out of couple relationships) that children experience, the lower their over-all emotional, psychological, and academic well-being.
10% of women in the US have had three or more marriages, divorces, or cohabiting partners...by age 35 (the next highest industrialized nation is Sweden at 4.5%).
By age 15, 29% of US children experience two or more mother partnerships (either marriage or cohabitation).
16% of persons born after 1970 will marry, divorce, remarry, and redivorce (also see Cherlin, A.J. Marriage, divorce, remarriage. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
Americans marry, divorce, and cohabit more than any Western society. They also start and stop relationships more quickly.
Second marriages (with or without children) have a 60% rate of divorce and 73% of third marriages end in divorce (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 2006); at least two-thirds of stepfamily couples divorce (Hetherington, For Better for Worse: Divorce Reconsidered, 2002).

There are 35 million Americans in the US today who are remarried (US Census, 2007).

There were 224,939,628 people in the US in 2004 (224.9 million).
At that time 12% of men & 13% of women (15 years old and over) were remarried twice.
An additional 3% of men and 3% of women were remarried three times.
Thus, 15% of men and 16% of women were remarried at least twice.
Therefore, of all men and women (age 15 and above) 15.5% were remarried at least twice which equals 34.9 million people (34,865,642 to be exact).

A significant number of stepfamilies are preceded by an out-of-wedlock birth and a subsequent marriage (note: not a “remarriage”). When you consider that 40% of babies in America were born to an unwed mother according to a 2009 report by the National Center for Health Statistics revealed, you can see what happens when those mothers marry, that's a blended family.
In saying that, the highest number (around 90%) of stepfamilies are formed after one or both partners have experienced a divorce.

Children whose parents have divorced are roughly 2X as likely to have their marriage end in divorce compared to their peers.
66% of the increased risk in getting divorced comes from the actual divorce of their parents (Brian D’Onofrio, Indiana University Bloomington).

In a study by Deal & Olson, The Remarriage Couple Checkup, Thomas Nelson, release date Jan 2009):

The data supports their expectations

On average, couples in stepfamilies have 3X the amount of stress of couples in first marriages