step-parent

RHONA, Shropshire A There are no hard and fast rules on being a good step-parent, any more than there are on being a good parent.

Section 2(2) of the Divorce Act says a child of the marriage includes a child to whom the step-parent stands in the place of a parent.

A stepchild herself, and now a stepmother, she couldn't be in a better position to meet other families and discuss their experiences of becoming a stepchild, stepsibling or step-parent.

Larger families, one-parent families and families with a step-parent showed elevated risks for child maltreatment.

If children have been raised very casually and a new step-parent arrives, implementing and enforcing strict, formal standards, the whole family might as well don their nuclear-protection suits, because tempers are going to flare!

One parent may be a step-parent, or children can live with two adults who act as parents but who are not married.

Those divisions can grow by an order of magnitude, advisors say, when family members are not related by birth but by a marriage between a biological parent and a step-parent.

The program continues to cover: spouses (including same-sex spouses); a parent, step-parent or foster parent of the employee; a child, step-child or foster child of the employee; or the employee's spouse.

The survey, by counselling organisation South Warwickshire Relate, revealed that one in 10 children now live with their natural mum or dad and a step-parent. Staff at Relate will run the four-week course, called Positive Step Parenting, each Monday from November 6.

You went through a change in 2005--new school, new step-parent, new home?

In the past few years, trusted government-funded researchers inflated rates of parental sex abuse by re defining "parent" to include, "boyfriends or girlfriends or adoptive step-parent [or] parent substitute." These researchers also defined a "family" predator as anyone in "a romantic or sexual relationship with a parent." This is a very vicious attack on parenthood and families, an attempt to make parents appear to be the real danger to children.

Many who grow up in single-parent or step-parent families have a harder time than those from intact households in keeping a steady job or forming a stable marriage of their own.

Miriam, in contrast, learns that her fears of epilepsy are groundless; it was a step-parent who had the condition.

(The assumption being, one supposes, that a boyfriend or girlfriend, live-in partner, or step-parent would only grudgingly provide support and advice.) Married parents, she contends, are also better able to nurture children, establish parent-child bonds, and "recruit other sources of social and emotional capital" By this I think she means that they can draw upon resources like friends and neighbors in the community, although in Whitehead's antiseptic social historian-speak, that sounds almost commercial.

The sample consisted of I00 adolescents including an equal number of boys and girls from monogamous (both-parent) families and polygamous (step-parent) families.