“Wicked stepmothers don’t show up in the data,” agrees Todd Jensen, a research assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, US, who studies relational patterns between stepparents and their stepchildren. In a 2021 survey of 295 stepchildren, Jensen found most had positive relationships with their stepmothers. Participants were asked about how close they felt to their stepmother, how much they thought their stepmother cared about them, whether she was warm and loving and how satisfied they were with communication and the relationship overall. In this sample, the average score for stepmother-youth relationship quality was 3.91 out of 5.
