I hold my breath as my daughter, aged 10, nocks up an arrow and leans backwards into the tautness of the string, drawing her bow arm back to her cheek.

She looks magnificent, and like she’s having the time of her life. She is fiercely focused, her biceps rippling in the sunlight. Beside her, my partner gently coaches: “Keep your feet planted, really steady, and look down the sightline. Release only when you feel still, on an out breath.”

A pause, pregnant with intensity. She looses the arrow and it spirals across the top of the target. The two of them laugh and high-five. “You did great,” he says. “Keep going - you’ll get there.”

She looks up at him with love and awe, but then quickly checks herself and adjusts, Danny Zuko-style.

I have hundreds of these memories, growing fuller and more whole as my children age. Memories of my partner - although not a trained teacher - coaching both children through countless video games, bowling, archery, hundreds of board games, spelling, maths problems, the scientific method, writing formal letters and their own CVs, relationship issues and puberty advice, friendship break-ups and make-ups and body-image hang-ups and design mock-ups and any number of personal cock-ups.

Yet every one of those memories is tainted, ever so slightly, by the adjustments, the checks, the barriers in their relationships because - and this seems oh-so important to everyone - he is not their father.

The most recent data that I can get hold of, in terms of numbers of stepfamilies in the UK, is from 2011: nearly one in 10 dependent children lived in a stepfamily in that year. The research is remarkably scarce. A Pew Research Center study in the US suggests that “more than 40 per cent of Americans have at least one steprelative”. That all adds up to an estimate of around 800,000 school pupils living in a stepfamily in England alone, with most likely millions of them having steprelatives of some sort.

And that depends on your definition, of course: just exactly what constitutes a stepparent is not well defined at all. It is almost a statistical guarantee that you teach many, many pupils who have stepfamilies.

According to a 2016 report by relationship charity Relate in the UK, 61 per cent of stepparents reported good relationships with their stepchildren - in contrast to 91 per cent of parents who reported good relationships with their own children. But we don’t have an actual measure for this - just their word for it, and the cultural repertoire of stepparenting is oddly stuck in an uncomfortable groove. Stepparenting narratives have barely moved on since Snow White. We have no shortage of film and TV depictions of uncomfortable, conflict-driven relationships. But there is a sad lack of depictions of supportive and loving ones, where the stepparent does not seek to oust a parent or stage a coup, but to cheerfully add to the parenting team.

My partner (and we are not married) has fully earned the title stepparent, because step is what he does best. He steps back and clarifies the situation, when things are emotional or my mothering gets too clouded by feeling, helping us all to solve the problem in front of us. He steps up, when my children need anything, anything at all: time, attention, energy, love, care.

Most of all, he is one step ahead: a careful planner, a thoughtful organiser, a thinker-ahead. He’s packing the suntan lotion and bottles of water and fetching the sick buckets and washing the bedclothes. He is remarkably adept at doing emotional work, and he has taught me how important this is, to smooth the road of parent-child relations for everyone. He is not just an add-on, a plus-one, a next step - he’s a step forwards, a progression of our family, something that makes us not just quantitatively but qualitatively different. Where are the narratives that reflect my experience?

Great expectations

It’s 2019, and staff at both my children’s schools seem faintly embarrassed around me, and unsure of how to deal with my partner’s relationship with them.

I understand that there are language issues - as I write this, I realise that there isn’t even an official word for his relationship to my children, given that we’re not married - but there is no reason why an initial awkwardness over who has which surname should bleed into every school-home interaction.

The staff were, to give them the benefit of the doubt, unprepared, perhaps unwilling, to support our new family set-up, after I separated from my now ex-husband. Salt in the wound, anyone? How about a great big careless sprinkle of it, hail-like, on top of a festering, raw injury of heartbreak and yet hopeful redemption? How can we, in school, be unprepared to deal with such a widespread family set-up, if it affects at least a tenth of our pupils?

A huge part of the problem is that it feels as though the school expects the relationship to be fraught, that they have no scripts for a healthy and loving (pseudo)stepparent relationship. What is going on?

Expectations matter. Ever heard of expectancy effects? Telling handlers that rats are “bright” or “dull” - get this - in fact makes the rats do better or worse at a maze task (Rosenthal and Jacobson, 1963). This research is also known as “self-fulfilling prophecies”, and it’s interesting because some of the effects seem to linger even when people are not themselves conscious of the beliefs they hold.

Rosenthal (1994) famously generalised these results to children at school, giving name to the so-called Pygmalion effect (children who were expected to do well showed significantly greater academic gain than those who were not, regardless of ability).

The expectancy-effects literature is full of this stuff; you also might have heard of the Galatea effect, where being overestimated by a teacher can encourage a student to put more effort into learning (subtly different from Rosenthal’s finding, because it involves self-efficacy) and the converse, known as the Golem effect, when a child might be discouraged from taking intellectual risks after being underestimated by a teacher (Jamil et al, 2018).

But what’s this got to do with parenting and relationships?

“Children also are affected by the opinions and actions of their biological parents and other family members as they develop relationships with stepparents,” state Ganong et al (2011). I’d add teachers and other education professionals to this list: my children spend more time with teachers than they spend with me in an average week.

My partner is already severely disadvantaged by my ex-husband intervening in his relationship with my - our - children. If my children’s teachers choose to hang back - perhaps not even being outwardly negative of their relationship, but simply expecting it to be difficult - then his task becomes positively Sisyphean.

There are two reasons, and only two, why my partner has such an excellent relationship with my children: his effort and mine. It has not been easy. I have forfeited many rights and privileges, at times supporting his decisions when I think better of them, and at times I have been frustrated to tears with being criticised and challenged. But it has been totally worth it. I expect and trust that they will love one another, and they do. It is that simple. So why are we surrounded by people who seem to think differently?

‘Mouldable clay of love’

I’ve recently been trawling through the separated-parents policies of various schools. Honestly, they make for terrible reading. I could do better in half an hour. The words “estranged” and “absent” are still being used to describe parents (I have had them used to describe me and, believe me, it is enraging and unfair). No one can seem to agree as to what is meant by “parental responsibility”, other than legal definitions stuck in the early part of the 20th century (mothers get it automatically; different rules apply to fathers. Still).

This highly gendered stuff seems to exist everywhere - one piece of commentary on the research report I read only ever referred to “stepmums”, erasing stepfathers completely. In fact, the 2011 data suggests that 85 per cent of stepfamilies surveyed featured children from the woman’s previous relationships, and only 11 per cent from the man’s, so this is particularly idiotic.

Even worse, in the school policies, ideas about stepparenting contain references to “casual” relationships and what is “appropriate”. Honestly, who do you think you are? I am sure that somewhere there exist parents who bring new partners to meet their children without a mountain of soul-searching, but I’ve yet to meet them. I was seeing my partner for a full two years before he met my children. He has now been in their lives for seven years. I’ve seen teachers speak to him like I picked him up on my shoe in the street, or they did.

When it comes down to it, the thing is this: parents are saddled with their kids; stepparents actively choose to love them. We don’t shy away from talking about my partner walking away from the relationship - not because we aren’t great together (we are magic), but because the whole situation, with ungrateful-at-times kids and my ex, is sometimes almost too much for one person to bear. I see that. But he has invested in my kids, has loved them when it has been incredibly painful to do so and other people have told them that he doesn’t, or that this love is wrong or - there’s that word again - inappropriate. What is appropriate, exactly?

If, from a school’s point of view, you don’t want a “casual” stepparent but you can’t look with acknowledgment and humanity upon one who loves children who aren’t biologically his, what exactly is it you are looking for?

I think I know the answer, all too well. I think teachers, like most ordinary people, are infected with mono-heteronormative scripts, which portray leaving a marriage or a relationship - especially one with children - as the worst kind of failure. That, far from seeing a family relationship as simply a mouldable clay of love and support, they see it as a china vase: somehow finished, fired, complete and, once broken, ruined forever. They call it a “broken home”, don’t they? Except mine isn’t: mine is so very whole.

The instructor comes over to see my daughter, stretching her bow arm back a little further. “That’s right,” he smiles. She looses an arrow and it flies true. “Your dad obviously taught you well,” he says, and my daughter freezes, a whirlwind of “he’s not my dad and no one can think that” circling her brain. It is simultaneously one of the worst things she can imagine, people thinking that he is her dad, and also one of the best.

Lucy Rycroft-Smith works in communications and research for Cambridge Mathematics

This article originally appeared in the 8 November 2019 issue under the headline “One step for child, one giant leap for schools”