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Honoring stepfathers this Father's Day

BY MARILYN COLEMAN AND LAWRENCE GANONG | Marilyn Coleman, is a professor of Human Development and Family Studies at the University of Missouri, Columbia. Lawrence Ganong is a professor of nursing and co-chair of Human Development and

June 15, 2008

Father's Day has never had the clout of Mother's Day. Dads are lucky to get a card or the proverbial ugly tie. But, one group of fathers outdoes Rodney Dangerfield in terms of getting no respect - stepfathers.

From the slasher movie series, to "Hamlet," to "The Color Purple," stepfathers are portrayed in film and literature as abusive, exploitive and uncaring. These stereotypes have been around for centuries.

A prominent sociologist, David Popenoe, director of the National Marriage Project at Rutgers University, even stated that a woman with children who remarries is putting her children at risk for child abuse!

Popenoe must have been thinking of controversial work by Canadian scholars, Martin Daly and Margo Wilson, who found that stepchildren were at much greater risk of abuse than children living with their two biological parents.

There is a small body of research that agrees with this conclusion, but this work almost always lumps together men who are unrelated to the children's mother and are living with her and her children. So, in addition to remarried stepfathers, these studies will include boyfriends, uncles, grandfathers and friends of the mother.

If we just consider men who have legally married the mother of their stepchildren, there is little difference between biological fathers and stepfathers in their propensity to abuse children. A recent study found slightly more severe abuse in stepfather households than in father households (8.2 percent to 5.4 percent), but less mild violence among stepfathers (49.6 percent to 57.1 percent).

Yet the stereotype of stepdads as especially abusive has persisted. Partly this is because until recently they were often invisible. It's not widely known, for instance, that the "father of our country," George Washington, had no biological children but was stepfather to Martha's children.

In more recent times, stepfathers may have preferred to go unnoticed to avoid being stigmatized as abusers. It was fairly easy to stay invisible to the outside community because relatively little was asked of them. The main role of fathers was family breadwinner. Until a generation ago, stepfathers, who almost always replaced a father who had died, could slide under the radar if they brought home good money and left child rearing to mothers.

Beginning in the early 1970s, however, divorce replaced parental death as the most frequent precursor to remarriage. Stepfathers now are an extra parent rather than a replacement. In a world of joint custody, what is the role of a stepfather? Parent, friend, mentor, stranger, breadwinner?

Parental rights are nearly sacrosanct in American law. Unless they adopt their stepchildren, which is possible only with the consent of the biological father, stepfathers are legally considered "strangers" to their stepchildren. They cannot legally sign the children into emergency wards of hospitals or authorize medical procedures, even if they are the only parent available. They cannot have access to school records, even if they are the ones helping with the homework every evening. A stepdad who raises stepchildren for years has no claim to visitation or custody after divorce.

It's good to remember on Father's Day the nation's proud past of notable stepfathers. Besides Washington, Dr. Seuss was a stepfather, along with Ashton Kutcher and Brad Pitt, Sen. John Kerry and singer Johnny Cash. Former President Gerald Ford, Shaquille O'Neal, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Reagan, Booker T. Washington and Barack Obama all had stepfathers.

How can we help to make a stepfather's job easier? We might ask the U.S. Census Bureau to try getting a more accurate count of the number of stepfathers and stepchildren. This is challenging, because household membership is fluid in post-divorce families, with children often moving in and out of both parents' households. The Census tends to use a low estimate because it does not ask enough questions to figure out the relationship of children in the household to the Census respondent. Low estimations of stepchildren result in overestimating their risk for abuse.

We might also encourage state legislatures to support limited parental rights for stepparents, as Great Britain has done, so that fathers do not have to sever ties in order for stepfathers to gain legal rights to go along with their responsibilities. Although the British model is just a few years old, new enough so the jury is still out on how effective it is, stepfathers in the United Kingdom at least can legally help make decisions about children's health care and education.

Finally, we might think more creatively about men and families, allowing for the possibility that children can love and be loved by a father and a stepfather without having to choose sides. We might think of giving children permission to make two cards for Father's Day.