Book Reviews
Stepfamilies: History, Research, and Policy
edited by Irene Levin and Marvin Sussman
Review by Patricia Schiff Estess
If you're having a difficult time getting your new stepfamily to "work," here's a compilation of studies that focuses not on how difficult is it (which it is), but on the factors that promote family cohesiveness and integration. It's by far the most readable of the three academic books reviewed here - thanks in part to some researchers well-known to SAA and their "sounds like our family" approach to communicating - people like Marilyn Ihinger-Tallman, Kay Pasley, Marilyn Coleman, Lawrence Ganong, Anne Bernstein, and, of course, Emily and John Visher. This is a good book to keep by the night table - as reference and inspiration - when life in a stepfamily becomes uncommonly chaotic. That's because the research once again debunks the notion that still persists in some areas that the stepfamily is an incomplete or undesirable institution.
Lots of interesting stuff finds its way into the pages:
- How halfsiblings perceive the "ours" child in a remarriage. (Best if the "ours" child comes at a time when the remarriage is established; also best if there's only one child from each of two marriages.)
- How people differ in their attempts to establish their new households. (Some try to use the nuclear family as a model; others explore a number of possibilities to see which fits; others try constructing a new and innovative family unit nixing the idea of the nuclear family which didn't work for them the first time around.)
- How men and women differ in their therapy needs. (Stepfathers needed to know about ways to handle stepfamily situations; stepmothers wanted to know that what they were experiencing was "normal" and needed to know what to expect.)
A good read!