Over 50 percent of all marriages end in divorce, and over 75 percent of these folks will remarry, creating many potential stepfamilies. In fact, the website www.stepfamily.org claims that 1,300 new stepfamilies form every day.

The U.S. Census reported prior to 2000 that “50 percent of all children under the age of thirteen are living with one biological parent and that parent's partner” and that there would be more stepfamilies than original families by the year 2000. Unfortunately, the predictions made by the U.S. Census for the year 2000, and any year following, cannot be verified, as the U.S. Census stopped collecting stepfamily specific data. The reports they did make on their website, www.census.gov/prod/2003pubs/censr-6.pdf, such as identifying over 4 million stepchildren in the United States in 2000, were followed by the disclaimer: “[the Census] may have identified only about two-thirds of all stepchildren living with at least one stepparent because of the manner in which the data were collected.” Since the definitions of stepparents and stepchildren have become so broad and ever changing, the validity of recent data is definitely in question.