Family Structures

Family Structures

The structure of a family can affect a child’s emotional and psychological development in many ways. Parents influence a child’s attachment style which can affect their social life with peers, authority figures, future romantic partners, and, one day, their own children. Siblings and relatives also affect childhood development. When you think of only-children, do you perceive their actions to be different with friends and school peers compared to those with siblings? What about children who grow up in multigenerational homes (kids, parents, grandparents, etc.)? In this chapter we will discuss how children are influenced by family structure, divorce, parenting styles, culture, socioeconomic status, and more.

Types of Family Structures

A family is a group of at least two people who work together as a unit, share financial resources, and are related either by blood or by legal contract such as for adoption or marriage. Families come in many constellations and can include groups or pairs of related adults without children. Families with children can include parents who are single, married, a common-law or long-term couple, separated, divorced, or widowed. Family members can also include stepparents, adoptive parents, and foster parents, along with other caregivers such as grandparents, uncles, aunts, older cousins, and siblings.

One family type is the nuclear family, in which children live with two parental figures. According to the 2022 U.S. Census data, only 65% of children under eighteen years old live in a household with two married parents. This is a decrease from 77% in 1980.

A single-parent family consists of a child or children and only one parental figure. Single-parent households have been on the rise. In 2010, 27% of children lived with a single parent, up from 25% in 2008. In 2022, the U.S. Census reported that about 1 in 3 children live in single parent households, with 80% of children living with single mothers (U.S. Census, 2022).

Another common type is the blended family, in which at least one parent has remarried, and stepparents and stepsiblings may be present (Ginther & Pollak, 2004). About 7% of children live with at least one stepparent (Anderson et al., 2022). Among children living in two-parent households, nine percent live with biological or adoptive parent and a stepparent. The majority (70%) of those children live with their biological mother and stepfather. Family structure has been shown to vary with the age of the child. Adolescents are less likely to live with two parents than younger children. Sometimes children in blended families live part of the time in a second household with another parent, and this splitting of time between households yields a commuter family.

Finally, extended families include the nuclear family as well as other relatives (e.g., aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews). According to Pew Research Center (2019), 38% of the world’s population lives in extended families. An intergenerational family is a specific type of extended family that includes parents, children, and grandparents living together as one unit (Li & Huang, 2017). In 2020, 7.2% of U.S. households were intergenerational (Washington et al., 2023). Although intergenerational households can provide support systems (Mohangi, 2022) and an opportunity for grandparental involvement (Tanskanen & Danielsbacka, 2018), they can also result in interpersonal conflict (Mohangi, 2022), and adverse behavioral and cognitive outcomes for children (He & Wang, 2021).

Families can contain parents of any gender, sex, and sexual orientation. Gay, lesbian, and queer families can be nuclear, blended, intergenerational, or any other type. In the United States, around 2.6 million LGBTQ+ adults are parents (Wilson & Bouton, 2024). Research indicates that high-quality parent-child relationships and overall well-being are present in a variety of family constellations (Farr et al., 2020; Patterson, 2006; Tornello & Patterson, 2018).

Parental stressors and satisfaction

LGBTQ+ parents may face unique stressors, particularly with discriminatory treatment or barriers to becoming parents, such as adoption policies and cultural attitudes (Patterson, 2024), however, they experience similar levels of parenting satisfaction, parenting quality, and child development outcomes as heterosexual (Patterson, 2024). A meta-analysis found that children growing up in same-sex households had higher developmental well-being than those raised in opposite-sex households (Suárez et al., 2022). For example, children raised by same-sex parents perform better academically compared to children raised by opposite-sex parents (Mazrekaj et al., 2020).

Heterosexual couples may also face unique stressors including uneven and inequitable workloads and childcare responsibilities, particularly in dual-earner homes. Though paternal involvement has increased over the last several decades, research indicates there is a lack of balance in home and childcare labor, with mothers often doing a larger share of both roles (DeGroot & Vik, 2020; Sayer, 2016). Working mothers in particular face risks related to role strain, feeling the stress of competing and overwhelming life demands, which can decrease self-care and emotional well-being over time (Dugan & Barnes-Farrell, 2020). This inequality may have increased during the era known as “pandemic parenting” (Calarco et al., 2021). However, when fathers and mothers balance the caregiving and household roles in two-parent heterosexual families, it predicts greater emotional well-being in children and in parents as well as improved parent-child relationship quality (Chung, 2021).

Some families may face unique risks, for example, when adopted children have experienced early adversity or lived in an institutionalized setting. Research shows that when adoptive parents provide warm, sensitive parenting, adoptive children are better able to improve in their attachment and have a lower risk in long-term behavior problems (Paine et al., 2021; Yarger et al., 2020). Foster parents and facilities can use these same strategies to improve child developmental outcomes (Chodura et al., 2021; Wade et al., 2024). Children can thrive and experience healthy development in any of these. Overall, they benefit more from stability and consistent caregiving and support than from a particular type of family structure. Healthy family dynamics and caregiving begin with attachment, synchrony, and building trust in infancy and then grow into more defined parenting styles in early childhood.

Parenting Programs

Parenting programs can be effective in improving the lives of parents as well as their children (Bornstein et al., 2022). Effective parenting programs focus on responsive caregiving, including talking, reading, and playing with children (Jeong et al., 2021), teaching concrete parenting practices by having parents identify their needs and learn appropriate parenting techniques (Belsky, 1984), and addressing parenting well-being (Rusu et al., 2025).

Various family structures result in parental stress, which is negatively associated with parental well-being (Rusu et al., 2025), which is positively associated with child emotional and behavioral problems Ribas et al. (2024). However, research indicates that managing parental stress through mindfulness training (Potharst et al., 2019), structured parenting programs, particularly those that also involve the child (Tehrani et al., 2024), and social support as a function of meaning in parenthood and self-efficacy (Dong et al., 2025) can improve parental well-being.

The efficacy of parenting programs has been studied in high-income countries, with limited data in low-income countries, and even fewer studies with sound methodological designs (Mejia et al., 2012). Effective parenting program need to take into account factors associated with poverty (Mejia et al., 2012) and appropriate cultural adaptations (Masiran et al., 2020).

Family structure and child and adolescent outcomes

Developmental psychologists have long been interested in the role family structure may play in child and adolescent outcomes. Researchers have investigated a variety of such structures, including two-parent families, single-parent families, multigenerational families, and step- or blended families. The differences observed are probably due to the different ways family members function and interact with one another more so than to the family structures themselves. In other words, many different family types can thrive or have difficulties, often based on complicated contextual factors such as family resources. Disparities in resources, such as available income and the ability to monitor children, also factor heavily in producing different outcomes.

Decades of research on family structure and outcomes have shown a consistent pattern: children and adolescents in two-parent households fare better across a range of physical and psychological measures of well-being (Langton & Berger, 2011; Parache, et al., 2023; Savell, et al., 2023). The component of family structure that most strongly influences infants’ and toddlers’ social and emotional development is the number of caregivers. Families with two caregivers, such as a mom and a dad, two moms, an uncle and a grandmother, or any other combination of two adults, tend to experience less stress than single-parent households (Biblarz & Gottainer, 2000). A higher percentage of adolescents in both single-parent and stepfamily households exhibit more negative behavioral conduct (such as acting out) and higher levels of depression and anxiety (Parache, et al., 2023), and worse physical health (Langton & Berger, 2011) than adolescents in two-parent households. This pattern was also reported in a large-scale national survey of Korean youth (Park & Lee, 2020), with some additional findings: adolescents from families other than two-parent households showed higher levels of risky behavior such as drinking and smoking, higher levels of suicidal ideation, more stress, and lower perceived level of academic performance.

But what is it about family structure that causes these observed outcomes? Socioeconomic status is one such link. Studies of families in the United States (Savell, et al. 2023) and Germany (Parache, et al., 2023) found strong associations between SES and adolescent well-being. Two-parent households typically have more income and other resources (such as time) available for benefiting household members. The financial strain that comes from having fewer resources could contribute additional stress in other family structures. Other factors include the level of parental monitoring and parental ability to protect family members from adverse health conditions that result in accidents and injury (Langton & Berger, 2011). The negative findings for stepfamilies may seem confusing since these families have two parents. However, stepfamilies tend to experience lower income levels, greater potential for within-family conflict, and less stability.

Government policies and programs can be informed by recognizing the role these factors likely play in child and adolescent outcomes. For example, as a society, we may look for ways to support single-parent households financially through tax breaks or other programs in order to increase positive outcomes for children and adolescents living in this common family structure.