Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Centered But Not Caught In The Middle: Stepchildren's Perceptions Of Dialectical Contradictions In The Communication Of Co-Parents, Dawn O. Braithwaite, Paige W. Toller, Karen L. Daas, Wesley Durham, Adam C. Jones

Communication Faculty Publications

The researchers adopted a dialectical perspective to study how stepchildren experience and communicatively manage the perception of feeling caught in the middle between their parents who are living in different households. The metaphor of being caught in the middle is powerful for stepchildren and this metaphor animated their discourse. A central contribution of the present study was to understand the alternative to being caught in the middle and what this alternative means to stepchildren. Reflected in the discourse of stepchildren is that to feel not caught in the middle is to feel centered in the family. Stepchildren's desire to be …