Research on Multiple Family Transitions: An Overview

I provide an overview of three decades of research on multiple family transitions and their implications for children’s and adults’ development and well-being across the life course. I describe how the advent of longitudinal surveys and improved conceptual models revealed that repeated family change and family complexity are common features of contemporary family organization and discuss key contributions that research on family transitions has made to family science. Collectively, this scholarship has shifted the field away from viewing family change as uniformly harmful and toward a more nuanced understanding of its diverse forms and consequences. The article concludes by highlighting future directions for research that integrates structural inequalities and broadens the scope of family transitions studied.