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It's a familiar story. Your parents divorce, you start pushing the envelope, and before you know it, you're sent off to military academy. Once you've done your time, your girlfriend comes to collect you; your mother's "too busy" to pick you up herself. You're suspicious and discomfited. Something's just not right. Sure enough, you discover, in short order, that 1) mom is too busy having sex with a guy who wants to replace your father to care about you anymore and 2) he's a serial killer who wants to murder you and your siblings so he can have mom all to himself. Oh, he wants to kill your girlfriend, too--with a circular saw. Have a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agcxkUGT7UY&feature=player_embedded
Stepfather is a deliciously improbable, campy horror story of sorts, and its mise-en-scene--the divorced and remarried American family--got my attention as a stepfamily researcher. What are we to make of the movie's entirely unsubtle messages, including: "It's not just stepmothers who are horrible; having a stepfather is dangerous." And, more broadly, "Stepparents are the destroyers of first families"? The facts about stepfathers and stepfather families are these:
*There are more of them. At least officially. Mothers still tend to be awarded custody post-divorce. And the U.S. census only counts homes with kids in official residence as stepfamilies.
*We understand them better. There are twice the number of studies of stepfather families as there are of stepmother families.
*Stepfathers struggle. Those in Mavis Hetherington's Virginia Longitudinal Study and James Bray's Developmental Issues in Stepfamilies Project frequently reported being what Patricia Papernow calls "the stuck outsiders in the stepfamily architecture," feeling shut out by the kids and unsupported by their wives in their efforts to parent.
*But stressors are different for stepfathers. Hetherington and Constance Ahrons found that in general a female ex has higher levels of involvement in her ex-husband's home, creating more opportunities for conflict between stepmother and mother. Stepfathers, on the other hand, are less likely to be dealing with an ex who is highly involved in the day-to-day life of the other household.
*Social expectations of stepfathers are different from those of stepmothers. For example, a stepfather is less likely to be judged for holding back and waiting for the kids to warm up to him, rather than rushing in to create closeness and attempt to "blend" the family as stepmothers frequently feel obliged to do. But he will likely feel pressure to be the provider to often ungrateful kids who wish he'd just go away.
*They deal with bias. A number of stepfathers told me they felt the weight of cultural suspicions--that all stepfathers are child molesters, for example, or physically abusive.
*He might just make it after all. Hetherington found that the kids in her cohort warmed up to stepdad when they perceived that he made mom happy, improved their financial situation, and didn't judge or discipline them.
What about the serial killer in Stepfather, anyway? Fantastical and overblown, to be sure. But evolutionary psychologists Martin Daly and Margo Wilson suggest that it might be compelling precisely because it engages one of our most primitive, and well-founded, fears. They discovered that children with a stepfather were indeed at dramatically higher risk--a stepfather was seventy times more likely to kill a child than was a genetic parent (I discuss this research at length in my book Stepmonster). They also found that stepfathers killed in different ways. A parent, Daly and Wilson discovered, was likely to smother or shoot a child, often leaving a note indicating a belief that he was actually "saving" the child from some hardship or horror, and frequently committing suicide after the murder. Stepfathers, on the other hand, killed children by what the team termed "more assaultive means"--kicking, bludgeoning, or beating a child to death, and virtually never committing suicide after. Stepfathers, Daly and Wilson conclude, kill out of rage, while parents seem to do so more often out of delusion or deep, implacable depression.
The reality of stepparental lethal abuse is horrifying--and the stuff of horror movies. But as human behavioral ecologist and family expert Kermyt G. Anderson, told me, "99.9% of stepparents are not murderers, let's remember that." Given the very real stressors on stepparents--from the Ex factor, to normal but still hurtful hostility and resentment from the spouse's kids to financial strains--the fact that most of us manage as well as we do as stepfamilies seems less like something the culture should automatically expect, and more like a tremendous achievement. Thanks, Stepfather, for setting the bar so low, giving us a laugh, and making us look so good by comparison.
