I actually would quite like to be proved wrong here and hear lots of happy stories about it all coming together well. 
I suspect it's more likely to work when the kids are very young and grow up with another person in a parent role, rather than if families are blended in later life.
My own experience of a blended family is negative and has led me to think that children hardly ever like their step-parents and step-parents don't really love stepchildren like their own (which I think is understandable) although they may care for them and do their very best by them, and that the dynamics of two families living together - some perhaps part time (like I was) - just don't work and lead to all kinds of tensions and resentments. Biological parents have to juggle spending time with their own children and forming a relationship with stepchildren. People co-parent side-by-side despite families having different parenting styles and some children being raised differently for half or a percentage of the time by another party.
Not sure if I can think of a better way to do it though because lots of people split up and lots of people fall in love with new people that they want to be with and that's understandable. I guess maybe people need to stop trying to pretend it's a thing and just parent their children separately. In my case I think half the problem was the parents having this 'rose-tinted' view of what our new family would look like and finding it hard to accept that the kids didn't like each other or their step parents!
AIBU?
To think blended families don't work?
4China · 25/11/2015 16:28
I agree I think often the parents would have a rosier view because it's what they want - to be with the person they love and to do the family thing together. And kids often don't speak out because they know that there is this pressure from the adults to be happy and get along and (in my experience) because it's hard to say 'I love you but I would like some time with you away from HER and them as they're not my real family and I don't like them!' 
Depends what you mean by "work" yanbu though, higher misery potential all round, on average.
My step dad is wonderful, I refer to "all my parents" when speaking about them as I feel he's had just as much of an impact on my life and upbringing as my dad (who was by no means a hands off absent dad). He doesn't have his own children but thinks of me and my sibling as being such.
My dads ex partner loved my brother and I, still does despite them not having been together for years and years now. She does have her own children.
I think blended families can work if parents (not just the one in the relationship) want it to and the blending isn't forced at a rate of knots to make the adults happy. I didn't think of my step dad the way I do now overnight, probably took the better part of a decade (I was 10 when my mum met him).
I think a lot of newly single parents make poor choices regarding their new partners. Some step mothers really do try and force their step children out of the picture, especially common if they didn't have a child of their own at the start of the relationship but go on to have one.
My dad ended a relationship with a woman who had two children because she although she thought he was a great dad, she wanted him to be a great dad to her children rather than his own 
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