Penguin Books Australia

Introduction

Challenges are opportunities, and the most terrifying ones are best met head-on

I don't know where you were at midnight on New Year's Eve 2010, but wherever you were and whatever condition you might have been in (I think I was in bed!), you probably didn't real­ise that as you knocked the top off another bottle of champers you missed a watershed moment for what we might call the New Family. 2010 was the year, according to many experts, when step-families outnumbered first families in both the US and UK. Yep, one in three Americans and Brits is now a 'step' of some sort - step-parent, stepsister, stepbrother or stepchild - and sure enough, Australia seems to be following suit.

Speaking from personal experience, as both stepfather and psy­chologist, I can tell you that remarriage and step-parenting is challenging for everyone involved - not only for children, step­-parents and ex-partners, but also for their friends and wider family. As a step-parent, you can suddenly find yourself in a situ­ation where a child sees you as a walking ATM, an intruder, thief, marriage wrecker or rank outsider, which leaves the child feeling anything from mild unhappiness to such livid outrage that they develop homicidal fantasies about you. This doesn't mean they won't eventually come to love and accept you, just that the transi­tion requires great reserves of time and patience.

Think about it: in traditional families, parents bond with their children from birth and learn how to relate to each other over many years. In step-families, virtual strangers move in together, so it's not hard to understand why step-parents and children find it harder to tolerate each other's different values and behaviours.

Over the past 25 years I've worked with many young people who were struggling to come to terms with a new step-parent, and they all shared the same, deeply ingrained belief that the step-parent's arrival had prevented their parents reuniting. In other words, because they'd held fast to the fantasy of 'Mum and Dad getting back together', all their grief and anger at the loss of that dream was directed at the step-parent.

This means being a new step-parent can be the ultimate psy­chological double jeopardy: first you are tried and convicted by the stepchildren for destroying the possibly of their parents ever being reunited (and for taking up a lot of their parent's time - another factor against you). Then, to complicate mat­ters even further, your new partner may have one (or even two) ex-spouse(s) who, more often than not, have a bitter taste their mouths over the marriage break-up, and the role you will play in their child's life. A few may even have marinated themselves in vitriol before you step down the aisle and are just lying in wait.

The first two years of step-family life are the hardest. Some stepchildren display 'acting out' behaviours, while others regress ­a defence mechanism in which they flee from reality by assum­ing a more infantile state. Several of my adolescent clients fell back a developmental stage under the pressures and demands of step-family life. Normally well-behaved young people can resort to quite childish behaviour, including kicking, biting and scream­ing. Others use prolonged periods of introspective withdrawal (aka sulking), and still others have been known to try extortion. In one family I worked with, a bloke who had been estranged from his former partner and their children for some time was sud­denly contacted by his daughter. He told me that she had agreed to meet with him on the condition that he deposit $10 000 in her bank account (her explanation being that this would mean she would not have to work over the holidays!). I advised him against this.

Alas, this behaviour is not confined to the young people in the step-family: the adults, too, can become a little 'unhinged' in the first year or two. The stress of dealing with competing needs from their partner, their ex, their own children and stepchildren can interfere with their ability to recognise, let alone manage, their own conflicting thoughts and feelings. Preoccupied by their own psychological maelstrom, they can then completely miss the psy­chological smoke signals of their children's distress.

The rising emotional temperature in the step-family can interfere with the parents' ability to communicate, and anger and hurt become the language of the relationship. Things once easily discussed are left unspoken to fester and brew. A raft of social and emotional competencies, such as anger management, conflict resolution and problem-solving, sink without trace as the psycho­logical storm clouds gather, whipped by winds of indescribable familial pressure.

Step-parenting is different from biological parenting. It is less spontaneous, requires heaps more patience, effort, resilience and stamina, and it will seem as if everyone - be it your ex, your part­ner's ex, your new partner's friends or just the neighbour down the road - is watching you like a hawk.

But hang on a minute. The news is not all bad. For a start, young people can and do survive major transitions, and divorce is the first of these for many children who join a step-family. In a much-publicised 30-year study of 1500 divorced families in the US, psychologist and emeritus professor E. Mavis Hetherington found that 75-80 per cent of children and adolescents from the divorced families, after a period of initial commotion, were able to cope with the divorce and their new life situation and develop into well-adjusted individuals. While other researchers have found that the offspring of divorced parents have higher rates of teenage pregnancy, dropping out of school, substance abuse, unemployment and serious mental illness than the children of non-divorced families, this says less about the experience of divorce itself and more about the family members' psychological and socioeconomic situation. Pre-separation conflict - rather than parental separation itself - may account for much of the sta­tistical difference between children whose parents have divorced and those whose parents stay together. According to data from the US National Survey of Children, the experience of parental sepa­ration has only 'modest, statistically non-significant effects when measures of children's prior wellbeing are taken into account'. According to Professor Hetherington, divorce can actually teach some girls how to handle stress later in their lives: the divorce actually helps them to become more responsible and socially competent. As adults, many still feel pain and sadness when they think about their parents' divorce, but the majority go on to build productive lives, and while there are exceptions, they don't nec­essarily experience clinical levels of depression, anxiety or other mental health disorders.

The authors of a review prepared for the Australian Psycho­logical Society discovered that many children find adjusting to their parents' divorce a challenge, especially when contact with the non-resident parent is infrequent or non-existent. They also found that a child's adjustment was influenced by two key fac­tors: exposure to hostility between separated or divorced parents, and the quality of the relationship between the parents and child. Divorce or separation in itself is not necessarily the problem - it's conflict between parents and a tough relationship with one or both parents that can have a bigger impact on a child's adjustment.

Step-families may have myriad complex issues to deal with, but the risk is often exaggerated; according to a Time maga­zine article in 2006, the risk of a middle-class American second marriage failing is only 3 per cent more than a first marriage. In Australia, divorce statistics show that the risk of a second mar­riage failing is no greater than a first. However, these figures do not include relationships where couples co-habit without getting married, which might bump up the failure rate.

Other researchers have found that a step-family's sense of wellbeing actually increases over time, compared to the decrease in happiness reported by traditional families over time. Profes­sor James Bray, who conducted a nine-year longitudinal study of 200 Texan families in the 1990s, found that a strong, stable step-family was just as capable of nurturing the healthy develop­ment of children as a nuclear family.

The trick, then, is getting to the 'strong and stable' stage when there are so many challenges along the way. A hostile relationship with your ex-partner, for example, means your children suffer, yet if you are too close to your ex, your new spouse may feel anxious and insecure. On top of this, many children don't view their step­parents as 'real parents' for the first few years - if ever - and more complications can occur when parents in second marriages treat their biological children differently from their step-children.

Fortunately, researchers and clinicians today better under­stand the common pitfalls of step-families and how they can overcome them. Step-families are different to traditional families, and most go through several phases on their way to becoming healthy, functioning and supportive. My aim is to help step­parents understand this process, and to give them strategies to deal with the uncertainty, frustration, guilt and jealousy that they might encounter along the way.

So if you feel your step-family is a bit like the archetypal lemon which breaks down constantly, never ever reaches top speed and seems forever in need of a service, I'm here to help it become a smooth-running, slick-looking, fuel-efficient and safe car with ABS brakes, side curtain airbags and electronic stability control that zips along the highway of life.