Risk of maltreatment of children living with stepparents

Stepparents have rather a poor reputation. Webster’s unabridged dictionary defines “stepmother�? as follows: “1. The wife of one’s father by a subsequent marriage. 2. One that fails to give proper care or attention.�? The “step�? root comes from an Old English word meaning “to deprive or bereave�? (Gove, 1976) and evidently retains its negative connotations today. Ganong and Coleman (1983), for example, gave American undergraduates a semantic differential task in which they were called upon to rate “brother,�? “cousin,�? “mother,�? “nephew,�? and so forth on a variety of evaluative scales; “stepmother�? and “stepfather�? were rated worst.