Beyond The Brady Bunch: How to make stepfamilies work

Blended families can be complicated. Men and women who are marrying again make up 40 percent of new marriages in the U.S. each year and kids are often involved in those marriages.

Stepchildren often see their parent's new partner as less of a mother and father and more as an awkward addition to their once functioning family unit.

So how can two families that have their own rhythms and rules, successful meld together? And when they do is it anything like the Brady Bunch or are those expectations too high?

Kerri Miller brought together two experts on stepfamilies. William Doherty is a professor of Family Social Science at the University of Minnesota and long-time family counselor. He was joined by Patricia Papernow, who is the director of the Institute for Stepfamily Education and author of "Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships."

Both Doherty and Papernow emphasized the importance of lowering expectations for the new marriage.

"To do a stepfamily well is an amazing achievement in self-awareness and self-discipline," said Doherty.

"We lack cultural understanding about stepfamilies, they're not unnatural, they've been around forever, but we don't communicate the cultural wisdom, and so each new generation getting remarried are like lemmings going into the sea," he added.

For Papernow it's crucial that new parents cultivate a relationship with their stepchildren rather than concern themselves with being an authoritarian figure in the children's lives.

"Children have an attachment to their parent and not their stepparent, and whereas the adults see that as splitting or divisive kids see it as, 'I want my parent not my stepparent.' I think it's one of those places where kids and adults see the family very differently because they have a different experience of the family."

Patience above all is important. It takes time to bring a family together successfully, especially when coupled with pressure from outside parents, stepsiblings, and other factors.

"It's not the image you had in your mind. It does take quite a lot of muscle. I think all relationships take muscle to maintain kindness, and I think it takes extra in a stepfamily," said Papernow.

To hear the full conversation use the audio player above.