What most often brings couples into counseling when at least one partner is in his or her second marriage? What is the reason most often cited for second divorces? You guessed it. Conflicts on how to best deal with the children.

The nature of the conflict is predictable, not because stepmothers and stepchildren are bad or good, but because of the nature of the system. It’s no accident that the villainous women in Cinderella and Snow White were ‘wicked stepmothers’.

It’s no accident stepmothers end up with bad press, but it’s not all our fault. Take a look at our opening credentials. The stepmother is a ‘replacement’. That’s a fact of nature, no matter how much psychology and how many fancy terms we invent to describe our role. Your coming into the child’s world is the result of either a divorce or death, both bad news and both separating the child from his or her mother.

The fact of entering an ongoing system as an outsider sets the stepmother to end up in predictable dead end self-defeating behaviors. The most obvious of these is our tendency to see ‘bad behaviors’ of the children that “must be fixed.” If there breathes a stepmother anywhere who hasn’t been hooked by this desire, I haven’t found her and that includes in the mirror.

Focusing your energy on “fixing” the children, no matter how well intended will backfire. The kids know exactly who is responsible for the new sterner rules. The new rules might be more psychologically correct or effective when viewed from outside, but will become stumbling blocks for the stepmother. This is not to say the kids run the house. Of course not. The idea is, avoid the seduction of making our role in the family “the new mean boss,” to avoid making ourselves miserable by hooking obsessively into how the children “must change.”

You can certainly contribute to behavior change with the children—later, when you are more comfortable with them and they with you. Give the family time. If you think you’re already sunk, you’re not. Notice how much of your energy is spent on “what is wrong with these children” and determine to change your focus. Not for ‘them’ but for ‘you.’ Because you want to have a better time in this family.

There’s no expectation that the children’s behavior isn’t going to make you nuts. It will. Or that your husband, loaded with guilt, will be more effective parent. He will off and on. The goal for us as stepmothers is to avoid falling into the habit of spending the time we have alone with our husbands catching him up on all the bad things the children did that he might not have noticed.

Also, locate one friend and say, “I need a place where I can blurt out every horrible, unfair and ridiculous behavior of my stepchildren and their father, and all the things I say and awful things I feel, without you thinking less of me.” Or write in a journal and hide it well. Because stepmothers need all the help we can get.