Some find that building a cohesive, trusting second family can take much longer—as many as five years—because children must learn to trust a relative stranger after watching their parents’ relationship implode. Unfortunately, many new stepparents harbor unrealistic expectations about how quickly they can create a bond. “Just because you’ve married a child’s parent, it doesn’t mean you’ve automatically formed a relationship with that child,” says Robert Galatzer-Levy, a child and adolescent psychiatrist in Chicago.

The younger spouse’s relationship with older stepchildren is often fraught with conflict, as he or she struggles with balancing the role of authority figure against that of friend.

In many cases, as Simon discovered, a seemingly strong relationship a with a child can deteriorate after the wedding. This is partly because the remarriage destroys any hope a child may harbor that his or her parents will reunite, Hausner explains. “Even if the person has had a relationship with the child for a long time, when that myth is dispelled, it’s painful.”

Equitable Allocations
Deciding how to distribute money among children during our first marriage can be difficult. When we add the complications inherent in a second marriage, the issue can become quite volatile. As with most problems involving family relationships, the solution here, therapists and second-family members say, is to clear the air and discuss the issues openly. Hausner recommends that early in our relationship, we have a money conversation, in which we discuss our different economic histories and preferences. This is especially important if one spouse is wealthier than the other. “The biggest challenge high-net-worth couples face in a second marriage is when there is a significant disparity in the economic levels of the two families,” she maintains. “What if one set of children inherits a trust fund at age 21, and the others will have to work to put themselves through college?”

We must take our spouses and stepchildren’s needs into account, which often means we must compromise on issues of lifestyle. Hausner tells of a mother of three young children who married a much wealthier man who was living off his trust fund. While she was accustomed to spending liberal amounts of time with her children, her new husband liked to take frequent sailing trips to Bermuda. He expected his new wife to come along—without the children. She initially agreed, causing her offspring to feel a double loss. Not only had their parents’ marriage dissolved, but their mother was now away much of the time. The couple finally visited a marriage therapist, who helped them reach a compromise: They would continue the trips, but make them less frequently.

Disparities in affluence between spouses, or differences in their child-rearing philosophies, often vex our attempts to plan and manage the distribution of wealth, attention and responsibilities among our children and stepchildren.

Even when a husband and wife are consciously trying to be fair, differences in wealth can mar an otherwise congenial family atmosphere. Hausner recounts another story of a newly married couple, each with two teenage children, who decided to help all four youngsters pay for their own cars. The parents proposed to match the exact amount of money each child could contribute on his or her own. But their plan went awry because the husband came from a much wealthier family than his wife, and his children had received significant amounts of money from their grandparents. They were able to buy much more expensive cars than their stepsiblings, who quickly grew to resent their new stepfather for what they perceived as favoritism. Where routine expenses are concerned, such as transportation, “all children should be treated equally,” Galatzer-Levy recommends. This also applies to opportunities such as private schools or summer camps: If parents pay for one set of children, he says, they should offer the same opportunity to the other group.