City - June 5-11, 2002
By Cindy Mindell-Wong

“Ten years ago I became a stepmother. I did everything wrong and I was miserable. Step-parenting can bring out the worst in you.” Even psychotherapist Estalyn Walcoff couldn’t get the step-mother knack, “an inherently impossible role,” she says. So she trained as a stepfamily counselor with the Stepfamilies Association of America.

Walcoff started the Stepfamily Association of Rochester (SFAR) in 1998, to offer support and education “so that stepfamilies can build and not fall apart,” she says. She is now a Stepfamily Consultant through “Stepfamily Matters.”

Here’s Walcoff’s motivation: In their first four years, 50 percent of all first marriages in the US break up, and 75 percent of remarriages-with-children fail. SFAR works to get helpful information to stepfamilies before they become statistics.

SFAR holds a free annual seminar on the stepfamily. This year’s “Building Successful Stepfamilies” program will address legal issues, discipline, the “ex,” helping kids cope, and keeping the marriage healthy, and will include a teen stepchild panel. In addition to its annual event, SFAR offers counseling referrals, a speakers’ bureau, and support groups.
“Divorce is very painful for everybody,” Walcoff says, and even more so for kids. “When a parent remarries, children have to abandon the dream that their parents may someday get back together.” If anger and sadness go unaddressed, she says, kids can carry those feelings into the new marriage, and take them out on the stepparent.

Myths of the stepfamily abound in our society, Walcoff says. There’s an expectation that as soon as you remarry, everyone will feel like a family. But that can take several years. “Love takes time. And unless the kids are very little, it may not come at all.” But what stepparents can insist on is respect among all family members, she says.