Stepmoms often find their role can be hard

By Karen S. Peterson
USA Today

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Many women dream of becoming moms. Few dream of becoming stepmoms.

On their good days, stepmothers think of themselves as bonus moms or mentor moms.

On their bad days, they believe they are thought of by stepkids and ex-wives as something just above pond scum. Or not thought about much at all.

Those who monitor the family say stepmoms need to be thought about. New research shows they do not often fare well with their stepchildren. Yet many experts say stepmothers have a key role in making a blended family work. And they note that the blended family — whether the parents are married or just living together — is the family form of the future.

More than half of all Americans today have been, are now or will eventually be in one or more step situations, says the Stepfamily Association of America. About 30 percent of all kids are likely to spend time in some sort of "stepping" arrangement. And those kids are increasingly likely to be spending more time with a stepmom as courts begin favoring joint custody that increases the children's time with dad.

Huge numbers of stepfamilies are making it, melding successfully. But others fight jealousies, unrealistic expectations of instant love, the financial demands of child support, ill-defined roles and a constant undertow of tension.

New stepmoms can quickly feel overburdened. The stepdad tends to rely on his new wife to be the emotional glue that holds the new family together. Even if his children don't live full time with her, she tends to be deeply involved in their lives.

"Women are still socialized to care for the kids," says James Bray, author of "Stepfamilies," based on nine years of government-funded research. "And men will let women do that. Unfortunately, men will dump the care of the children on the stepmom."

She may tire of the kids' hostility, the lack of involvement of her well-meaning husband, the resentment from an ex-wife who will never accept her right to love the children.

Many stepmoms will throw in the towel, leaving kids to go through a second parental divorce, says Diane Sollee, founder of the Coalition for Marriage, Family and Couples Education. The role of the stepmother "is pivotal in the redivorce equation."

The statistics are not encouraging. While the divorce rate is leveling off, it is still worse for second marriages than for first-timers. About 48 percent of second marriages fail, while about 40 percent to 43 percent of first marriages do. Approximately 65 percent of remarriages involve children and create instant stepfamilies.

For a variety of reasons, not all stepchildren hold their stepmoms dear to their hearts. A growing body of disturbing research documents that the myth of the "evil stepmother" dies hard. Her new husband's children may simply never truly accept her, a woman they see as an interloper.

Among recent findings suggesting that stepmoms are often not cherished by stepchildren:

• Only about 20 percent of adult stepkids feel close to their stepmoms, says the pioneering work of E. Mavis Hetherington, involving 1,400 families of divorce, some studied almost 30 years. "The competition between noncustodial mothers and stepmothers was remarkably enduring," she writes in "For Better or For Worse: Divorce Reconsidered".
• Only about one-third of adult children think of stepmoms as parents, suggests Constance Ahrons' 20-year research project. Half regard their stepdads as parents. About 48 percent of those whose moms had remarried were happy with the new union. Only 29 percent of those whose dads had remarried liked the idea of a stepmom. Ahrons is a sociologist and senior researcher with the nonprofit Council on Contemporary Families.

Stepmoms, Ahrons says, tend to get overly involved in their stepchildren's lives, whether the kids actually live with them or not. Stepdads often back off and stay out of the fray. Stepmoms need to approach the stepkids "very, very slowly. The women want so badly to be part of the family, and they tend to come on too strong too soon."

To make these often fragile blended family arrangements work, stepmoms are attending workshops and conferences, clogging Internet chat rooms and message boards with plaintive requests for help, joining real-life and virtual support groups, starting associations, drawing on a growing cottage industry of books and reaching out to other women who understand.

"This issue is just huge," says Susan Shapiro Barash, author of "Second Wives". Her next book will center on the struggle. A daughter is already competing with her mother, and then this new woman comes along, Barash says. And the stepdaughter becomes "keenly aware of what the new woman does for her father that her mother didn't do."