Marilyn Coleman Author & Editor

Lawrence Ganong and Marilyn Coleman have studied, taught, counseled, and mediated with stepfamilies and stepfamily members for over 30 years. They are prolific authors (7 books, over 200 journal articles), whose writing and thinking about stepfamilies have heavily influenced researchers and clinicians for many years. In their persistent use of a risk and resilience approach to studying stepfamily relationships, Ganong and Coleman have given the field many new ideas, such as “concrete babies,” “inherited stepgrandparents,” “mothering but not a mother role,” and the “end table phenomenon.” Their 2004 edition of this book was the most comprehensive examination of stepfamily relationships to that point in time, and this volume is even more wide-ranging.