Articles for Stepmoms

Alleviate your anxiety and frustration over your complicated, sensitive role in the stepfamily with the information in these newsletters about topics that impact stepmothers.

Step-mom or Step-MAID? How to Stop Feeling “Locked Out, Looking In”
I recently received an email from a concerned stepmom expressing frustrations with her living situation and asking how to address them. The letter reflected challenges I've heard from many stepmoms over the years, in one form or another.

Her first concern was that she felt like an outsider, or like hired help, rather than feeling like part of a cohesive family unit. This is actually two separate problems, and here's the crux of it:

You need to feel like a wife, before you'll start feeling like a mother.

Why Your Step-kids Hate You (and What to Do About It)
Your step-kids are getting it from all sides, but they’re going to be taking it all out in one place: on you.

They have to deal with their mother’s venom, their father shirking responsibility, and discomfort caused by accommodating you as you enter their lives. In their eyes, you are new, you are strange, you are temporary, and you are disposable.

That can change with time. With some patience, empathy, and clear, consistent boundaries, your step-kids will grow to trust, connect with, and maybe even like you.

Can Remarried Couples Stay Together?
Ever feel like you and your husband are running two households in one home? Can you even remember why you married him? Where’d the romance go? Parenting your children consumes your day; parenting his kids consumes his. They’ve become the marriage’s focus, moving your relationship as a couple onto the back burner.

How to Develop a Parenting Plan After Remarriage
Co-parenting is tough. Between difficult exes, threatened spouses, manipulative children, communication challenges, and the messy aftermath of previous marriages, parents and step-parents alike have their work cut out for them.

Understand the obstacles to co-parenting, their effects, learn how to overcome them by collaborative planning, and keep your new marriage from ending the same way as your last one.

The Stepmom’s Marriage Manual
Violated expectations breed strife. Everyone has ideas about how things should be, and dreams about how they will. And then, well, things aren't. The new wife, the old father, and the young children all have their own expectations; the thread that threatens to unravel your marriage is how everyone winds up wrong.

How Kids Sabotage Remarriages and What to Do About It
You’re free from your old, poisonous relationship. You’ve found someone new who you love. Remarriage is shaping up to be the best time of your life.

That is, unless your children have something to say about it...

5 Ways Undermining Bio Moms Haunts Stepmoms
Joining a family is a tricky thing. You worry that you’ll be forever stuck on the outside, looking in. So, you want to please your husband and his children as best possible. This way you can solidify your role in the family, and bring stability into your life. If you’re particularly ambitious, you may even be out to heal your new family’s past wounds inflicted by the divorce or ex-wife.

You’re compelled to win everyone over. You won’t settle for “Step-Mom.” “No, call me ‘Super-Mom!’”

There are just a few teensy things in the way...