The Truth about Stepfamilies: Real American Stepfamilies Speak Out
Minneapolis-based journalist O'Connor has translated eight years of personal experience as a stepmother plus in-depth reporting among stepfamilies across the country into a lucid guide to the labyrinthine family dynamics that result from divorce and remarriage. "The work of creating a well-functioning stepfamily is the hardest thing" that people in these reinvented families say they have ever done, O'Connor writes. With this helpful and sympathetic volume, she aims to help stepfamilies struggling with issues such as creating boundaries between immediate stepfamilies and "outer" (original) families, negotiating family roles, raising children in separate homes, disciplining children in a stepfamily, and dealing with feuding adults and money-related strife. Many of her highly readable chapters weave in anecdotes that illustrate suggested coping strategies; others begin with a list of the dramatis personae, followed by a brief ethnography of a specific family system, with each family member's point of view represented. As divorce and remarriage rates continue to soar, this guide should be valuable to a broad spectrum of Americans negotiating new family structures.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.