excerpts from:
Stepping On My Toes:
Rivalry of Blended Families in Grimm’s Universe and Pop Culture
By Mädchen March, Ph.D.
...Just as racism and sexism are clear and systematic habits of institutional discrimination, so is the reality of parental favoritism in families, across all generations and cultures, with few enlightened exceptions. Our understanding of this intimate social dynamic can be deepened by examining its intricacies through the lens of fairy tales and folklore, in particular by focusing on the phenomenon of stepfamilies, which are prevalent in this type of literature....
...Let us begin with a discussion of biology using the example of three stories about fairytale princesses, contrasted with the Brady Bunch....
...Favouritism often occurs in families where parents have children from a previous marriage...
...Parental favouritism isn’t always intentional...
...The feeling of being loved and valued is related to self esteem...
...Research states that about half of the 60 million children under the age of thirteen in the U.S. were then living with one biological parent and one non-biological adult...
...Common problems described by stepchildren include feeling unwanted by a stepparent; feeling alienated within the new family; being torn by tension....
...Mythology is full of stepfamilies. Consider Zeus himself, who bore children willy-nilly with titans (Leto was the mother of Apollo and Artemis;), goddesses (his wife Hera was the mother of Ares), mortals (Alcmene was the mother of Hercules). Norse, Hindu, and Chinese mythologies contain plenty of stories about blended families that turn out for better or worse...
...Although Grimm’s Fairy Tales are full of stepfamilies as well, nearly every story having a dead parent as the misfortune that creates a sympathetic character. Although Snow White’s stepmother was arguably the most dangerous, Cinderella’s stepfamily has inspired studies on The Cinderella Effect, which documents abuse by step-parents.
...From Wikipedia: Powerful evidence in support of the Cinderella effect comes from the finding that when abusive parents have both step and genetic children, they generally spare their genetic children. In such families, stepchildren were exclusively targeted 9 out of 10 times in one study and in 19 of 22 in another.[6] In addition to displaying higher rates of negative behaviors (e.g., abuse) toward stepchildren, stepparents display fewer positive behaviors toward stepchildren than do the genetic parents. For example, on average, stepparents invest less in education, play with stepchildren less, take stepchildren to the doctor less, etc.[6] This discrimination against stepchildren is unusual compared to abuse statistics involving the overall population given "the following additional facts: (1) when child abuse is detected, it is often found that all the children in the home have been victimized; and (2) stepchildren are almost always the eldest children in the home, whereas the general (…) tendency in families of uniform parentage is for the youngest to be most frequent victims."[4]...
...However, modern mythology loves stepfamilies with funny problems. The Brady Bunch was a blended family without any unresolved anger, feelings of loss and sadness, or even mention of the other, non-present parents, an unrealistic and unhelpful mirror for viewers with similar situations. Modern Family brings out the comedy inherent in family differences, but again, it is hard to really show families dealing with depression, guilt, and grief in a funny way…
(Quoted with permission.)
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