Yours, Mine, and Ours: How Families Change When Remarried Parents Have a Child Together

by Anne C. Bernstein

Overview

Based on the author's experience as a family therapist and stepmother, and on interviews with more than fifty families, this book explores the ramifications for all concerned—remarried parents, his children, her children, and their baby—of having a mutual child.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780393306682
Publisher:	Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	07/17/1990
Series:	How Families Change When Remarried Parents Have a Child Toge
Pages:	350
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.30(h) x 1.00(d)

Editorial Reviews

Bernstein ( The Flight of the Stork ) here provides a needed book on mixed-family households. The author is a family therapist in Berkeley, Calif., also a stepmother of two and mother of ``ours,'' the child born to her and her husband. In a well-organized and admirably clear text, she combines material on her own home life with interviews with parents, steps and half-siblings. Humanizing bald statistics, Bernstein creates awareness of how divorce affects today's children and those responsible for their care. Sustaining harmony in households made up of offspring of previous and current marriages can be a trial, notes Bernstein, whose empathetic counsel should prove helpful. Her graceful revelations of ``fragile and interchangeable families'' will have wide appeal. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Scribner. Feb. 1989. c.480p. bibliog. index. ISBN 0-684-18700-0. $19.95. psych Bernstein, a psychologist who writes for Parents Magazine , links her own experience as a stepparent and biological mother with research and with interviews she conducted among 55 remarried households in which a mutual child was born. Among the topics she discusses are the decision to have a ``new'' child, varying attachments, parenting the second time around, age differences between half-siblings, help or hindrance from grandparents, and the difficulties small children encounter understanding complex relationships. The text is well documented but repetitious and littered with needless metaphors; quotes soften the somewhat long-winded style. Recommended to most libraries with moderate to large parenting collections.-- Janice Arenofsky, formerly with Arizona State Lib., Phoenix

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