‘You don’t have to be blood to love a child’ – why the myth of the evil stepmother needs to end
Two stepmothers share the keys to cultivating positive relationships with new stepchildren: respect for boundaries, clear communication and, above all, love
The depiction of stepmothers in children’s literature ain’t flattering.
Hansel And Gretel, Snow White, Cinderella, The Children Of Lir — all share a common trope: nefarious stepmothers who are big fans of abandonment, slave labour, death by fruit or animal metamorphosis (depending on what you’re reading).
Some believe writer Charles Perrault created the first evil stepmother in his 1697 Cinderella, others think it all began with Livia Drusilla, Emperor Caesar Augustus’ second wife.
Either way, the idea that stepmothers are, at best, second-rate and negligent parents and, at worst, attention-seeking murderers has become a perennial plot point in children’s literature for centuries.
It was something author Carmel Harrington became more acutely aware of when she became a stepparent. “From a young age, that cultural myth is pushed on to us,” she says. “When we were kids, we read fairy tales, Hansel And Gretel, and then it’s Disney and Cinderella.
“Everything is telling us that a stepparent cannot love a child and will use that child for their own advantage. It’s so damaging because it is soaked into these minds when they are very young.”
Parenting expert and author of 15 Minute Parenting, Joanna Fortune, agrees. “Children are raised on a narrative of the stepmother being evil, intrusive, and usurping not only the role of the mother, but the role of the children,” she says.
Harrington realised how ingrained this stereotype is and how harmful it can become when she appeared as a panellist on chat show Elaine. She mentioned in passing she was a stepmother. Several days later, she received a four-page letter from an irate viewer.
“It was basically hate mail telling me how evil I was… just by me saying I was a stepmother, [someone] had decided that meant I was evil, that I had broken up a family… none of which was true.
"It was really upsetting and I thought, ‘How terrible, this person doesn’t know me or anything about me’. I thought, ‘Okay, there is the preconception’.”
At first, she was disheartened, but the ‘preconception’ encouraged Harrington to write a novel, A Mother’s Heart, about the complexity of stepmother/daughter relationships. “I wanted to show how much more nuanced and balanced life is like as a stepparent,” she says.
When Harrington met her now-husband Roger 17 years ago, she knew he had a three-year-old daughter, Eva, from a previous relationship and that he shared custody.
“In the beginning, I wasn’t involved and I didn’t want to be,” Harrington says. “I made a decision early on to wait because you don’t go into a child’s life unless you plan to stay there.”
Harrington decided to take things slowly. It was only when she knew she and Roger were fully committed to each other that she was introduced to Eva.
“When I did meet her, it was like love at first sight,” she says. “We became firm friends and allies very quickly. And we went from being a couple to being a little family unit when she was with her dad — she was the first daughter I had.”
For Harrington, becoming a stepmother meant moving slowly and being respectful of everybody’s boundaries.
“She had a mother who she absolutely loved, and who absolutely loved her. I never wanted to be her mother. What I wanted was to be an extra pair of arms for her, so that when she was with her dad, she had someone else to snuggle into and she had someone else to love her.
“It is a privilege to be those arms for her, and a safe place for her to fall. I don’t think there can be enough adults to love a child, particularly when they are very young and need all the support they can get.”
For Harrington, the word stepmother was bound up with a lot of negative connotations.
Cinderella was one of Eva’s favourite stories. In the evening, Harrington would read it to her. It felt strange adopting the same title as the ‘baddie’ in the book. She decided to reframe things — instead of being a stepmother, she would become Eva’s ‘Bonus Mum’.
“When my husband asked me to marry him, we sat down to tell my stepdaughter and I said to her, ‘I would be your bonus mum’,” she says. Harrington also invited her stepdaughter to invent her own nickname to describe her Bonus Mum.
“She had a mother who she loved and she didn’t want to call me Mammy, but she didn’t want to call me Carmel either because that felt wrong, as she saw me in a motherly role. So at the age of six, she came up and said, ‘Can I call you Cammy?’. She put Carmel and Mammy together and I became Cammy and it was so gorgeous.”
Carmel and Roger went on to have two children, Amelia and Nate, and described the arrival of the new siblings and the expansion of their family unit as a “lovely and positive experience”.
Of course, becoming part of a new family can be a confronting and unnerving time for many stepparents. Joanna Fortune says negative stereotypes of stepparents in pop culture makes things even harder. Individuals can often feel they are on the defensive — even if they have done nothing wrong.
Unsurprisingly, it is challenging to form new relationships and develop boundaries from such a position. According to Fortune, it is paramount that the biological parents ensure you are supported and welcomed into the environment.
They have to clearly demonstrate that “you are not encroaching, that you are not seeking to insert yourself into the family. Instead, the family circle is broadening out to include you. It needs to be led by adults”, she says.
“Every parent has stood in a kitchen and thought, ‘God, I would love another one of me to help out with this’. It would be great to look at a stepparent in that way.”
She acknowledges that this can be an idealistic view, especially when a separation or divorce can involve a lot of hurt and a breakdown in communications. Sometimes the dissolution of a relationship or family unit “is fraught with animosity, high emotion and hurt feelings”.
“That can be a difficult landscape to bring someone new into,” Fortune says. “It can be difficult for children to understand what is expected of them. They may wonder, ‘Am I betraying one parent by accepting you? Am I supposed to not like you?’. That’s why you need communication and clear family boundaries.”
She also says to approach the first meeting with a healthy dose of realism. “It is perfectly OK for you to be excited about meeting these children and for them not to be thrilled to meet you. I think that’s hard, but that’s OK.”
As the rates of divorce rise in Ireland, the number of blended families and stepparents are also increasing.
“You just have to reach your hand out and you are going to touch a blended family of some description,” Harrington says.
Within a blended family set-up, Fortune says it is paramount that parents, co-parents, stepparents and guardians respect each other’s styles and boundaries. She also says that every situation is unique and will take consideration and constant communication to navigate.
“So much is dependent on the circumstance: the age of the children; how long the parents have been co-parenting apart. If there is a blending of a family, there are more things to consider, like the family structure — has a child gone from being the eldest to the middle? That’s difficult for children to deal with.”
She says there is no manual on how to stepparent because “it is so nuanced and so personal to the people involved”.
Harrington thinks, societally, we should move away from outdated stereotypes and focus on the positives. There are studies showing that the relationship between a stepmother/ stepparent and child can be extremely rich.
A 2021 survey of 295 stepchildren in the University of Carolina found that most had positive relationships with their stepmothers. A 2017 study from the Athabasca University in Alberta found that stepparents can sometimes ease tensions and provide extra supervision and support in family units.
Harrington learnt so much when she became a stepparent, but she says the most important thing was the lesson that anyone can love a child.
“I say this unequivocally — you don’t have to be blood to love a child. Family is sometimes blood and love, but sometimes is also just love. I know that. As a mother to two gorgeous children — I absolutely love every part of them, but I absolutely love every part of my stepdaughter too.
“When you are a parent, whether it’s a step/ foster/adoptive/whatever type of parent you are, you make a decision to love that child. It doesn’t matter how that relationship started — what matters is that the child is loved by you.”
A Mother’s Heart by Carmel Harrington is out now.
