Clinical Guidelines for Working With Stepfamilies: What Family, Couple, Individual, and Child Therapists Need to Know.

This article draws on four decades of research and clinical practice to delineate guidelines for evidence-informed, clinically sound work with stepfamilies for couple, family, individual adult, and child therapists. Few clinicians receive adequate training in working with the intense and often complex dynamics created by stepfamily structure and history. This is despite the fact that stepfamilies are a fundamentally different family form that occurs world-wide.

Recoupling in Mid-Life and Beyond: From Love at Last to Not So Fast.

Divorce rates have dropped in the United States, except for couples over 50 where they are rising steeply, along with rates of late-life recoupling. Both stepcouples and their young adult and adult children in new older stepfamilies are often surprised to find themselves facing many of the same challenges that younger stepfamilies do. Some challenges are even intensified by the decades-long relationships and additional layers of extended family that come with recoupling after mid-life.