It is that dreaded time of year for stepmothers everywhere -- Mother's Day. It is reasonable that children spend Mother's Day with their mother. Meanwhile, stepmothers are left to justify why they do not care about Mother's Day.

There are few guidelines for stepmothers and stepfathers about how to understand child development or to parent effectively, instantly. They jump into middle of a kid's development and try to make sense of it. Usually with little support.

When you marry someone with kids, it's understandable to want to win over your new stepkids quickly. But the road to a stable relationship with your s...

It's a rare stepparent who hasn't tried, in their own way, to win over their stepkids. Whether it was snapping up two Justin Bieber concert tickets or...

Think of the fact that nearly 50% of all marriages end in divorce. Second marriages have a higher failure rate than first marriages. Why is this? He...

Once Upon a Time and the other stepmother tales suggest that, as a culture, we may still harbor deep anxieties about non-biological mothers.

As we slide into Mother's Day, it's clear that we're somewhat murky on what we're celebrating. Somehow, we moms are revered and problematic at the same time, and some are more problematic than others.

To stepmother Judy Osborne, Mother’s Day is “the hardest day of the year.” Osborne, a Brookline, Mass.-based marriage and family therapist, ...

When I got married, at twenty-three, I became a stepmother to a seven-year-old-boy. I'd known Jonah since he was four, and his parents had divorced wh...

Mother's Day is a sad occasion for many, but not all of the 15 million U.S. stepmothers who have stepchildren under the age of 18. As it approaches...

I wouldn't say that I'd been cocky about my aging parents -- I knew at some point they would pass. But for a long time, as I watched my friends strugg...

Old habits die hard, but when it comes to Valentine's Day traditions you had with a former spouse, die they must. When you're in a subsequent marriag...

Call them blended families, bonus families or para-kin. Just don't call them stepfamilies. The term -- seared into our consciousness through fairy tal...

The stepmother is probably the least-defined role in the contemporary family structure: She is a parent, yet not the parent. A caregiver but not alway...