ABSTRACT
Stepparents have rather a poor reputation. Webster's unabridged dictionary defines "stepmother" as follows: " 1 . The wife of one's father by a subsequent marriage. 2. One that fails to give proper care or at tention." The "step" root comes from an Old English word meaning "to deprive or bereave" (Gove, 1976) and evidently retains its negative connotations today. Ganong and Coleman (1983), for example, gave American undergraduates a semantic differential task in which they were called upon to rate "brother," "cousin," "mother," "nephew," and so forth on a variety of evaluative scales; "stepmother" and "step father" were rated worst.
