You knew Catherine Zeta-Jones was an Oscar-winning actress. But what about her side job — carpenter? Or, more specifically, the side job of women with stepchildren the world over: family carpenter. At first glance, a recent story about Catherine and her stepson in the Daily Mail is heart-warming: Catherine helped bring Michael and his wild-child, hard-partying young adult son Cameron back together after years of  estrangement, telling him "You are a huge part of this family and  you are always welcome"  (see the full story as it ran in the Daily Mail a couple of weeks ago:  http://www.mailonsunday.co.uk/femail/article-1151830/Catherine-Zeta-Jones-hot-girl-Zorro-brought-father-says-Cameron-Douglas.html). He's grateful for it, and it's nice to hear a new riff on the old narrative in which stepmothers are wicked excluders, surely.

Less heartening is the relatively new assumption in our culture that stepmothers, since they are women, should be family carpenters of sorts, repairing the house of family dysfunction whose foundation was built long before we came on the scene, building bridges between family members with long-standing resentments, renovating the lives of children with serious emotional and behavioral problems. Can it work once it awhile, this effort to Fix It? Yes, rarely. But should it be our calling and our full-time job when we marry or partner with a man with kids? Not necessarily. In fact, there's a very good argument that, while welcoming his kids can only help, trying to repair rifts and knit everyone into one happy family is likely to backfire.

It goes without saying that stepmothering is a landmine of judgments and "shoulds." If his kids aren't happy with the remarriage, it's because we're not trying hard enough to make them happy. If they stay away, it's because we're excluding them. If they don't like us, it's because we're not nice to them. The list of misapprehensions goes on an on, and shares a common assumption: the stepmother is responsible for the outcome with his kids. If she's good and patient, they'll come around.

But anyone who's been there herself, or read the research (including E. Mavis Hetherington's three-decade long Virginia Longitudinal Study and Constance Ahron's two decade-long NIMH-funded study) knows that things are a great deal more complicated than a woman's good intentions bringing about domestic bliss. For example, Hetherington,  Ahrons and others found that, while most children of divorce and remarriage tend to do just fine eventually, and it is the expectation that they are necessarily doomed that is more damaging than the divorce itself, more than twice as many kids of divorce have serious emotional and social problems compared to kids of intact families. And they found that these problems were linked to the high levels of family conflict these kids experienced before their parents divorced. Does the stepmother create the problems? No; the research is clear that they precede her. Now onto the issue of why she feels compelled to fix them.

Ahrons and others found that women with stepchildren spend twice as much time as stepfathers do educating themselves about stepfamily issues. Not to mention trying to sort those problems out and bring everyone together. Researchers have also found that stepfathers report both less involvement and less conflict with their stepchildren — and virtually no guilt about it. Stepmothers, on the other hand, typically make great efforts with children who are likely to resent and reject them, at least intially (and let's not forget that "intially," according to stepfamily expert and psychologist Patricia Papernow, can sometimes mean up to twelve years!) And when their efforts to win resentful kids over or create a warm family feeling with them fail, women are more likely to take the failure personally, to blame themselves rather than circumstances. The truth is that kids of divorce and remarriage are more likely to have problems, that they are likely to experience torturous loyalty binds, and that it is more or less normal for them to be rejecting and hostile, at some  point, toward "dad's new wife."

In the last three years I interviewed a number of women who had exhausted themselves — and unwittingly created huge resentments — by trying to foster rapproachments between their husbands and his kids. They thought they were doing what a woman "should do"; adult stepchildren felt they were overreaching, meddling, or should butt out. Other women had poured years of effort into building a "parenting coalition" with an ex-wife who was simply too resentful to rise above or meet her halfway. And then there were the women who had finally, sometimes after decades of unreciprocated efforts with their stepchildren, decided to withdraw and put their energies elsewhere.

Researchers tell us that one of the most common traps stepmothers fall into is the fantasy that we can repair a broken family or become another mother to kids still hurting from a divorce. While well-intentioned, these endeavors are most likely to set us up for a fall, and create tension all around. Much praise to CZJ and those like her who are welcoming to their husband's kids, even those with serious problems and alienating personalities. But good intentions are not the same as an obligation to pull off a miracle.