The Stepfamily Roadmap Nobody Gave You | Dr. Patricia Papernow

**Patricia Papernow** (0:00)
In 50 years of research, the worst for kids is not divorce, it's not single parent, it's not stepfamily, it's conflict and adult tension.
50 years of research, and that's in both first time families and stepfamilies, conflict is the worst for kids. Kids with divorced, low conflict parents are doing better than kids with never divorced, high conflict parents. So conflict and adult tension is really important to protect kids from.

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**Richard Taite** (1:09)
Today on We're Out of Time, we're talking about something millions of families live every day, but almost nobody teaches us how to navigate, blended families. Our guest is Dr. Patricia Papernow, one of the world's leading experts on stepfamily relationships. She has spent nearly five decades helping families understand why stepfamilies are fundamentally different from first time families and what actually works based on research, not opinion.
She's the author of Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships and the Stepfamily Handbook, and has received some of the highest honors in family psychology and therapy. Patricia, thank you so much for coming on the show today. What a blessing. We're very grateful to have you. Let's get right into it.
You've spent nearly five decades studying stepfamilies. What first pulled you into the work?

**Patricia Papernow** (2:09)
I married somebody who had a five-year-old and a nine-year-old, and about four years later, I was in graduate school, I needed a dissertation, and I could see that my stepdaughters were now four years older. I could see that something was shifting in our family, and it wasn't just that my stepdaughters were four years older.
I did my dissertation on becoming a stepparent. Lucky for me, I did not have to do what's called a quantitative dissertation with statistics since I'm terrible at numbers. I was able to do a qualitative dissertation interviewing stepparents. And you do a literature review for a dissertation, you read whatever's out there. It was nothing. I had the easiest lit review in the world. And now it's completely overwhelming. There's so much research out there, except it's not out where people can get it. So I'm really glad to be here.

**Richard Taite** (3:07)
Is what you've done initially still the standard or has it evolved?

**Patricia Papernow** (3:12)
The field has evolved.
I just updated the Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships. I just finished writing the second edition. First edition would have finished writing in 2012 This was 2026 Overwhelming amount of research. So there are some findings that hold through the years. And then there's a lot of layers of things that we've learned, especially about what makes a good step-parent and what kids need.

**Richard Taite** (3:42)
Beautiful. What's the name of the book?

**Patricia Papernow** (3:44)
Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships.

**Richard Taite** (3:48)
Good. Well, everyone's going to get the new edition.

**Patricia Papernow** (3:51)
Yeah. Well, the new edition won't be out till like early 2027, but the first edition has lots of solid information in it.
And the other book is the Stepfamily Handbook, from Dating to Getting Serious to Forming a Blended Family. That's a great one if you're just starting out.

**Richard Taite** (4:09)
Oh, that's magnificent. You say one of the biggest mistakes people make is assuming a stepfamily works like a first-time family. Why are they fundamentally different?

**Patricia Papernow** (4:19)
Well, a first-time family, the couple starts with some time together. The time to get to know each other, time to be in love with no distractions. They have time to develop some ways we do things. They have time to even get to know the things we don't like. I don't like how you love the dishwasher. You don't like how I love the dishwasher. But by the time the first kid comes at that, it's still ordinary. It's just how it is. In a first-time family, children arrive brand new. They arrive hardwired for loving connection with both parents and vice versa. We call that attachment. The next child and the next arrive equally hardwired for attachment to both parents and vice versa. In a first-time family, the family sense of how we do things develops over time as a family. By the time you're five or six or seven years down the road, lots of ways that we do things. We no longer even have language. It's just how we do that. In a stepfamily, so let's say that family splits.