Whom do married and divorced parents consider kin?

ABSTRACT

Despite the potential importance of kin to divorced parents in particular, prior research rarely studied how kinship patterns vary between married and divorced parents, nor within-group variations depending upon postdivorce residence arrangements and repartnering. We estimated mixed-effects logistic regression models using data from samples of Dutch married (N = 1,336) and divorced parents (N = 3,464) to predict the extent to which parents considered various blood relatives and (former) in-laws kin (i.e. parents, siblings, aunts/uncles, nieces/nephews, and cousins) and investigated differences within the divorced group per residence arrangements and repartnering. We found that married and divorced parents barely differed in the extent to which they considered blood relatives kin, but differences were large for (former) in-laws, and particularly great when parents did not reside with their biological child. Repartnered divorced parents were less likely to consider their former in-laws kin than single divorced parents but considered their new in-laws kin to high extents. For both blood relatives and (former) in-laws, parents were most often, and cousins least often considered kin. These results indicate that kinship patterns only differ for in-laws between married and divorced parents. Resident children may lead parents to consider former in-laws kin, whereas repartnering leads to exclusion of former in-laws.

KEYWORDS:

• Divorce
• kinship
• postdivorce families
• in-laws

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethical approval

This research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University (FETC20-089).

Notes

1 For purposes of scientific research, the New Families in the Netherlands (NFN) data is available at DANS: https://doi.org/10.17026/dans-24y-n8s4. The replication package containing the code to replicate the findings presented in this article can be found on OSF: https://osf.io/j3d6e/.

Additional information

Funding

The NFN data were collected by Utrecht University in collaboration with Statistics Netherlands (CBS) and were funded by [grant number 480-10-015] from the Medium Investments Fund of the Dutch Research Council (NWO) and by Utrecht University. This work was supported by the Dutch Research Council (NWO) [grant number VI.C.181.024]. This research was approved by the Ethics Committee of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences, Utrecht University (FETC20-089).

Notes on contributors

Christian Fang

Christian Fang (he/him) is a PhD candidate at the Department of Sociology of Utrecht University and affiliated with the Interuniversity Center for Social Science Theory and Methodology (ICS). His research involves using large-scale survey data to understand how family is “done” in postdivorce families.

Anne-Rigt Poortman

Anne-Rigt Poortman is professor at the Dept. of Sociology (Chair: Family diversity and life course outcomes). She has specialized in family sociology and social demography. She is particularly interested in divorce and repartnering, postdivorce residence arrangements for children, new relationship types, and legal aspects of partner relationships.