I'll be on the Stepmom Magazine facebook fan page today, participating in their expert panel. You ask the question, we answer. I"ll be on from 11 am to 11:45, and back on from 3 pm to 6 pm:

2010 is a watershed moment for what we might call the New American Family. This is the year, experts tell us, that stepfamilies will outnumber first families in the U.S. One in three Americans is now a “step” of some sort — stepparent, stepsibling, or stepchild. And half of us will be in a stepfamily situation at some point in our lives.

"How can I decrease my sense of resentment when it comes to my partner's kids?" you readers keep writing and asking. Or, how to "witness that a stepchild has problems — whether it's that he or she doesn't try in school, is spoiled by mom and dad, is entitled or irresponsible, hasn't developed key and age-appropriate life skills, or acts out in any number of ways — rather than experience it viscerally" and be torn apart by it?

As we're addressing the concerns of you, women with stepchildren, a reality is taking shape. Namely, many of you could benefit from counseling. Either couples work or individual work, but something. But as stepfamily researcher, social psychologist and stepmother Elizabeth Church, Ph.D. notes in her book Understanding Stepmothers, it's possible that a therapist treating a couple in a repartnership with kids will do more harm than good. Church details that many of her patients came to her after being treated by therapists with no training, familiarity, or real experience helping remarried couples with kids. The results were unfortunate: therapists telling women to "treat stepkids just like they're you're own" and otherwise importing a first-family model to address stepfamily or stepcouple reality. Since stepfamilies are different, that doesn't work. These couples understandably became frustrated, discouraged, even hopeless before finding real help.