The legal privileges and responsibilities are well established for children born within marriages, and there is a large literature addressing custody, visitation, and child support among divorced families ( Amato 2010). Furthermore, stepfamilies in which all children are born within marriage differ from MPF families in which some or all children are born outside of marriage. It is worth noting, though, that not all stepfamilies include a shared child (and thus there is no MPF), and not all MPF families are coresidential, which means they are largely excluded from the stepfamily literature because stepfamilies are generally identified via coresidence. Clearly, there is a fair degree of overlap between MPF families and stepfamilies ( Sweeney 2010). 2010) and declining rates of remarriage ( Brown and Lin 2013) have again shifted the character of MPF, with some or all births across partnerships occurring outside of marriage. By the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, however, rising rates of nonmarital childbearing (but lower rates of giving up children from nonmarital births) ( Jones 2009 Manlove et al. Also in the twentieth century, divorce surpassed spousal death as the primary way marriages among men and women in their childbearing years ended, with MPF occurring when a married parent divorced, remarried, and had additional children with his or her new spouse ( Logan et al. In the mid-twentieth century, young unmarried women who became pregnant often put their child up for adoption, then later formed marriages with another man and had additional children this, too, would be MPF, though we have no estimates of the prevalence of such behavior. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was not uncommon for a spouse and parent who had been widowed or deserted to remarry and have additional children in a new relationship ( Degler 1980). As such, men and women are increasingly exposed to, and actually are, having children with more than one partner, a phenomenon known as “multiple-partner fertility,” or MPF.Īlthough the nomenclature is fairly new, MPF is not exactly a new behavior. The United States has fairly high rates of teenage, nonmarital, and unintended childbearing in addition to high rates of dissolution among nonresidential unions, cohabitations, and even marriages. Today, this is less likely to occur, even though a stable partnership with two or more children by only one partner remains the preferred family life path for Americans ( Thomson, Winkler-Dworak, and Kennedy 2013). In the not-too-distant past, most families consisted of married parents and their shared children. Recent changes in union formation and stability, combined with changes in childbearing behaviors, have complicated the ways in which researchers and individuals think about families. This article touches on the implications of MPF for families and concludes by discussing the theoretical difficulties in studying MPF and the challenges it presents to public policy. Compared to parents with two or more children by only one partner, people with MPF become parents at younger ages, largely with unintended first births, and often do so outside of marriage. Drawing from recent studies and updated data, I present new estimates of MPF that show that about 13 percent of men aged 40 to 44 and 19 percent of women aged 41 to 49 have children with more than one partner, with a higher prevalence among the disadvantaged. The unique characteristics of families with MPF present data and other logistical challenges to researchers studying the phenomenon. Declining rates of marriage and overall increases in union instability, combined with high levels of unintended and nonmarital fertility, create the possibility for parents to have children with more than one partner, called multiple-partner fertility, or MPF.
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