This paper focuses on ways that adult children and children-in-law mediate contact between grandmothers and grandchildren, following marriage breakdown and remarriage in the middle generation. A qualitative analysis of face-to-face contact between 110 grandmother-grandchild pairs was conducted. Findings showed that adult children have a more direct influence on visiting, by arranging or obstructing visits between grandmothers and grandchildren. The influence of first or second children-in-law was found to be more indirect. By preventing an estranged spouse from seeing his or her child, custodial children-in-law could also be preventing a grandmother's access to her grandchild, if she depended on her noncustodial child to bring the grandchild to see her when he or she exercised visiting rights. Children-in-law could also act as intermediaries through their absence as well as through their presence. These findings, as well as ways that grandparents can negotiate relationships with adult children and children-in-law, are discussed. Especially noted is the value of monitoring communication exchanges, maintaining friendly relationships with children-in-law and step-grandchildren, and acting as resources to the family.

Using event history data from the 1990 Canadian Family and Friends Survey, this study examines several factors that influence the likelihood of remarriage for women and men whose first marriages ended in widowhood. Our results suggest that large sex differences in remarriage exist, with ever-widowed men having appreciably higher rates than ever-widowed women. Remarriage rates are shown to vary by indicators of lifecycle and by socio-economic status. The implications of these results are discussed.

Rates of sexual activity have been found to decline over the life course, as individuals experience marital transitions and the loss of partners, health problems, and decreased sexual interest. This article compares and contrasts earlier- and later-life sexual experiences and examines the changing meanings that older women ascribe to sexuality over the life course. Qualitative data from a study involving 24 women aged 52 to 90 who were remarried after age 50 illuminate a shift, as individuals age, from an emphasis on the importance of sexual intercourse and passion to a greater valuing of companionship, cuddling, affection, and intimacy. Situating the discussion in the context of changing cultural norms and sexual scripts, the article investigates the impact of health conditions on the women's sexual relationships as well as the women's tendency to have later-life sexual experiences more positive than were their earlier sexual experiences.

This paper examines the consequences of repartnering upon the social embeddedness of older adults' lives. The starting hypotheses, that repartnering is a stressful life event and is incompletely institutionalised, are examined using the NESTOR longitudinal survey data from The Netherlands on 4,449 respondents aged 55–89 years, together with in-depth interviews of 46 adults aged 50 or more years who had repartnered in later life. The results indicate that more repartnered older adults choose unmarried cohabitation and to ‘live apart together’ than remarriage. It was also found that when two partners come together, while not surprisingly their social networks become larger than those of separated older adults who do not enter a new relationship, less positively the quality of the subjects' relationships with their children was negatively affected. The older adults who opted for unmarried cohabitation and ‘living apart together’ relationships tended to have the weakest bonds with their children, principally for reasons associated with stress and (financial) insecurity.

This study compares levels of couple agreement about positive and satisfying features of their relationship as reported by a remarried sample (n = 70) couples and a more general sample of couples largely in their first marriage or committed de facto relationship (n = 100 couples). The ENRICH inventory (Olson et al., 1982) was used with the general sample and the ENRICH-Anew inventory (Schultz & Schultz, 1987) was used for the remarried sample, thereby providing the measures of positive couple agreement, which can in turn serve as indicators for strengthening family relationships. There were no statistically significant differences between the two samples, indicating commonalities in stresses and strengths experienced by the two samples. However, there are suggestions in the data that issues related to children and parenting were subject to lower levels of agreement for the remarried couples. The comparison couples produced lower levels of agreement in the areas of conflict resolution and relating to partner's family and friends.