Christina Haack rang in 2026 with a snowy trip to Park City, Utah — not with a new partner, but with her ex-husband Tarek El Moussa, his wife Heather Rae El Moussa, and the kids the two households share. On her own Instagram, Haack captioned the group photo by calling it “this blended fam” and noting the year was off to a great start — the kind of caption that treats a five-adult, multi-kid vacation as unremarkable. That’s not spin. It’s a pattern the two households have kept up for years, from theme-park days to shared Christmas Eves to this latest ski week, all with the same five adults showing up together. Divorced parents who still take joint vacations, split holidays under one roof, or show up at each other’s family milestones are still the exception, not the rule, which is exactly why the pattern behind that kind of arrangement is worth a closer look.
The Numbers Behind the Photo
Seventeen percent of U.S. children under 18 are currently growing up in a blended family, according to Pew Research Center’s 2026 analysis of federal survey data — down from 23% in 2013, mostly because fewer kids are growing up with half-siblings specifically. Nearly half of those children, 46%, live with one biological parent and a stepparent, the exact configuration Haack’s kids move between. The same data shows blended families skew younger: 22% of teenagers live in one, compared with 13% of children five and under. They also skew toward households with less formal education — 28% of children whose parents have a high school diploma or less live in a blended family, compared with 9% of children whose parents hold a bachelor’s degree — and blended households carry a real financial gap, with a median net worth of $86,300 versus $194,400 for non-blended families. None of that is destiny. It does mean the version of blending that gets photographed and captioned, with coordinated schedules and everyone getting along in matching parkas, takes work that isn’t evenly distributed by income or circumstance.
What Actually Makes Blending Work
University of Minnesota Extension’s guidance for blended families lays out what separates families that eventually cohere from ones that stay fractured, and it has less to do with chemistry than with process. Keep household rules simple and few rather than installing a new disciplinarian on day one. Let a stepparent build an authentic relationship with kids instead of performing a role. And, critically, let children stay attached to their biological parent without treating that attachment as disloyalty to the new household. The guidance is direct that ambivalence between stepparent and stepchild is normal, not a warning sign, and that bonding “goes through many stages” rather than arriving on a fixed timeline. Respectful coexistence is treated as a legitimate outcome on its own — not every stepparent-stepchild relationship has to mirror a biological one to count as working.
Why the Ex Relationship Matters as Much as the New One
What’s easy to miss in a photo like Haack’s is that the visible unit — mom, dad, stepmom, kids — sits downstream of a much less visible one: how the two ex-spouses talk to each other when no one’s taking a picture. Researchers who study post-divorce parenting generally sort it into two patterns: cooperative coparenting, where former partners coordinate directly and present a united front on rules and decisions, and parallel parenting, where contact is deliberately minimized because conflict runs too high to manage jointly. Cooperative coparenting is the harder of the two to sustain, since it requires former partners to keep functioning as a team on behalf of kids they no longer share a house with. It’s also the version that ends up in a New Year’s photo with five adults in it. Getting there rarely happens by accident; it requires both households agreeing on rules, schedules, and expectations well before a shared trip is ever on the table, then revisiting that agreement every time the family adds a new stepparent, a new sibling, or new logistics.
That’s the part a viral photo skips over. What makes a blended family work isn’t the trip, the matching outfits, or the caption — it’s the years of unglamorous coordination, the shared calendars and consistent rules across two houses, that made a five-adult vacation feel ordinary enough to post about in the first place.
