ABSTRACT
Individuals’ beliefs about family life are influenced by experiences in their family of origin, by media, by cultural standards, by observing other families, and, in the case of remarried adults, by their experiences in their previous families of procreation. In first marriages, melding marriage and family expectations with reality is a joint venture of the married couple. Together the couple negotiates roles, rules, and power within their relationship. In stepfamilies the construction of family life is more complicated because there are more family members involved in the negotiations, these family members often bring widely varying prior family experiences to the deliberations, and more than one generation are involved in the negotiating. Stepparents have been referred to as the “intimate outsiders”. Stepmothers appear to have the hardest role to fill, and this is probably true whether they are residential stepmothers with major parenting responsibilities or nonresidential stepmothers who see the stepchildren only occasionally.
