Making Peace in Your Stepfamily: Surviving and Thriving As Parents and Stepparents

Rating:
Summary: Interesting and warm, but misses 5 key points.
Review: I have been a professional stepfamily researcher, therapist, and consultant for 20 years. Dr. Bloomfield's book is warm, encouraging, and readable - yet misses the main points, in my opinion.

The advice he offers, sprinkled through interesting ancedotes, is validating, but superficial. He doesn't focus extensively on what I believe are the 5 main reasons stepfamilies are high-stress, high divorce enterprises: 1) co-parents' unacknowledged childhood wounds, 2) benign ignorance (unawareness) of a set of life-skills and stepfamily realities, 3) blocked grief in adults and kids, 4) courtship illusions, and 5) little or no effective stepfamily help in the media or most local communities. There is much *surface* good in this enthiusiastic, clear, well-intentioned volume - but - in my professional opinion - the real problems and solutions are not addressed.

I write this as a step-everything: stepgrandson, stepson, stepfather, and stepbrother.