Editorial: Step‐Families in Family Therapy and Family Science

• Published date: 01 March 2018
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/famp.12346
• Date: 01 March 2018
• Author: Jay L. Lebow

MARCH 2018 VOLUME 57 NUMBER 1

Editorial: Step-Families in Family Therapy and

Family Science

JAY L. LEBOW*

Fam Proc 57:3–6, 2018

We live in a time of enormous social change. Notions about what is “normal” and desir-

able in the lives of families are ever evolving (Walsh, 2012, 2016), and today often

mark a fault line across differences in points-of-view between cultures and subcultures.

Our field abounds in questions that merge aspects of evidence-based knowledge about var-

ious phenomena, what is pragmatically helpful in working with those phenomena in the

clinical and social policy contexts, and ethical, value-oriented considerations. And the

answers to such questions are inevitably processed through one’s personal experience.

In this complex context, some questions are simpler to consider than others. For exam-

ple, the most effective and efficient ways of ameliorating depression, or adolescent acting

out, or substance abuse, or getting high conflict couples to argue less are parsimoniously

explicated by having sufficient evidence to compare the efficacy of various treatments in

achieving these goals in various contexts (Fischer, Baucom, & Cohen, 2016; Liddle, 2016;

McCrady et al., 2016; Robbins, Alexander, Turner, & Hollimon, 2016). However, questions

that involve how to evaluate and work with evolving changes in society become much more

complex to consider. For example, how do we evaluate and best work with the present

near 50% divorce rate in Western society, and how does it inform social policy and clinical

practice? Is this historically high divorce rate just a sign of changing times, and of an

evolving new way of viewing divorce as a life option, or is the divorce rate a problem to be

remedied (Lebow, 2015)? Such broad questions also invite other more specific questions.

How do we evaluate divorce as an outcome of couple therapy? Is it a clear sign of treat-

ment failure, or a marker of a much less easy and meaningful metric to evaluate outcome?

And what are the best ways to work with divorced families and to what ends?

Similarly vexing is how to consider infidelity. Is it, as some suggest, most appropriately

regarded as a trauma to be treated as such (Spring & Spring, 1996), or as a more ecologi-

cally expected, albeit difficult, frequent part of today’s life space (Perel, 2017)? How best to

*Editor, Family Process, and Family Institute at Northwestern, Evanston, IL.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Jay L. Lebow, Family Institute at

Northwestern, 618 Library Place, Evanston, IL 60201. E-mail: j-lebow@northwestern.edu.

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Family Process, Vol. 57, No. 1, 2018 ©2018 Family Process Institute

doi: 10.1111/famp.12346