When Alan Taylor's father died six years ago, his mother told her five children she would never remarry. Yet within a few years she got engaged. "It happened very fast, which was hard on us," says Taylor, an assistant professor of child and family studies at Syracuse University who is married with four kids. "We had all these concerns. Was this person marrying my mother because he loved her? Was he marrying her for her cattle ranch? How can our mom bring someone into the family we don't even know?" As pictures of their deceased father were taken down in the family home in Fort Collins, Colo., and phone calls from Mom became less frequent, her kids struggled to adjust. Says Taylor: "Now Mom has someone else she can turn to."
Discussion about how a parent's remarriage affects children is usually confined to, well, children. But adults can also have trouble coping when a parent takes a new partner, whether it's following death or divorce. "The impact of a parent's remarriage on adult children tends to be overlooked," says Susan Newman, author of the forthcoming Nobody's Baby Now: Reinventing Your Adult Relationship with Your Mother and Father (Walker & Co.). "The parent-child bond is intensely strong. A parent's remarriage causes a shift in that relationship, and most adult children find it unnerving."
More adults are confronting this situation. With life-spans expanding, today's seniors living far from their grown children see remarriage as an attractive alternative to spending the next 30 years alone. According to the Census Bureau, approximately 13% of currently divorced 50-year-old men and 8% of currently divorced 50-year-old women can be expected to remarry at some point. Witnessing a parent's remarriage--though such unions are increasingly common--can feel awkward, even unnatural, to grownup kids. "As a child, you don't understand the courting years of your parent's life," says Amanda Dow, 31, whose father Wayne Gilstrap started dating two months after her mother died in 1997. In their small town, Pickens, S.C., his romance with Cathy, a divorce locals dubbed "the walking lady" for her outdoor exercise regimen, which was carried out in revealing workout attire, became a source of gossip. Dow watched her father's lifestyle do a backflip. He bought a Harley, got a new hairstyle and began traveling every weekend, a far cry from the frugal annual vacations he had shared with Dow's mother. "When my father remarried, I saw him express all these emotions to another woman. I felt like he was cheating on my mother," Dow says. She now accepts Cathy but is still worried that her kids are missing out. "If my mother were alive, my parents would be doing the grandparent thing," Dow says.
Jealousy and resentment are common in such situations, according to Lauren Solotar, chief psychologist at the May Institute, a counseling service in Norwood, Mass. "Incorporating everyone's demands takes time and energy when children live outside the home," Solotar says. "Figuring out how each person fits into the new blended family causes significant stress."