Parenting in India is changing, even if the law refuses to

Parenting in India is no longer fixed around bloodlines. Divorce is less unspeakable, remarriage increasingly visible, and step-parenting, long relegated to stereotype, has entered the cultural imagination. Blended families in India are now reshaping ideas of kinship in ways that are pragmatic yet quietly ambitious. 

“The hardest part was knowing that people would never see us as just a family,” says Tara Bhansali, a 28-year-old store designer from Pune raised by a stepmother. “There was always a qualifier — step, half, second. As if our bonds needed an asterisk.” 

Despite these changes, blended families in India remain deeply misunderstood. Step-parents occupy a paradoxical space: legally unrecognised, socially suspect and emotionally ambiguous. “For a long time I kept wondering where I really stood. Even now after six years that question hasn’t gone away completely,” says Gaurika, 47, a stepmother based in Goa. “There are moments of real closeness, like when I’m helping with homework, cooking their favourite meal, or when they call me if something’s wrong. But there are also times I feel like a guest in my own home.” 

In the curated portraits of urban progress, drawn largely from the lives of financially secure, English-speaking Indians, remarriage in India is presented as modern while carefully avoiding disruption. It reassures that family, though rearranged, remains intact, even as questions of loyalty and the hierarchy of bloodlines persist beneath the surface.

How pop culture shapes the rules of parenting in India 

Step-parenting sits at a cultural fault line shaped by myth and cinema, where betrayal and sacrifice loom larger than ordinary love. The stepfather is celebrated for “stepping up”, his care framed as heroic, while the stepmother remains suspect. Bollywood repeats this script, from Kuch Kuch Hota Hai(1998) to We Are Family (2010), rarely allowing her to be simply a parent. One of the few exceptions,Shekhar Kapur’s Masoom (1983), portrayed hesitation, resentment and trust without caricature, hinting at the real textures of modern Indian families. 

That nuance surfaces in lived realities. “There was a lot of unlearning for all of us, including my mother, to figure out what worked,” says Natasha Sharma, 31, an artist in Bombay and co-founder of the Govandi Arts Festival. “We had to move beyond the societal constructs of what it means to be a single parent, or to recover from neglect and abuse, and to learn how eventually to trust again.”

“THERE WAS ALWAYS A QUALIFIER — STEP, HALF, SECOND AS IF OUR BONDS NEEDED AN ASTERISK” — Tara Bhansali 

For Nitya Bala, 34, student and chef, now based in Melbourne, the absence of reference points made her family’s blended reality feel experimental. “I had no one around me going through this,” she says. “Unlike what one might expect, my stepmother took a backseat and let things emerge naturally. She never really tried to parent us, and in retrospect, that was just what we needed.” 

Sharma adds that society’s assumptions rarely matched her reality. She chose to call her stepfather by his first name, a decision he welcomed, but remembers people remarking that their “family of three women had suddenly been uplifted…even though we were already financially growing. It says a lot about how money and gender roles are woven into family dynamics.”

Her experience reveals a wider truth about parenting in India: women’s caregiving is expected and undervalued, while men’s care is cast as extraordinary. The  2019 Time Use Survey found women spend over seven hours a day on unpaid housework and care, compared to under three for men, a gap shaped more by social norms than  by economics.

Blended families in India mean survival for some, status for others

For the upper-middle-class or elite contexts, remarriage in India is framed as cosmopolitan. Kareena Kapoor and Saif Ali Khan’s blended family is held up as proof that love can be rearranged without shame. For the working class, remarriage is about survival: childcare shared, incomes pooled and households stitched together. For the middle class, anxiety centres on inheritance, housing and  respectability. Research published by Cambridge University Press highlights how ideals of respectability continue to shape young women’s choices and freedoms in urban India, echoing the quieter dilemmas of Indian parenting challenges. 

Ramesh, 45, a driver from Nashik, puts it plainly, “When I remarried, it wasn’t about starting fresh. It was about who would take care of the two children when I was on the road, how the kitchen would run and whether one salary could stretch far enough. In villages, no one calls it a blended family. It’s just managing what life has left you with.”

How stigma shapes the lives of children in modern Indian families

At the centre of these negotiations are children, asked to navigate divided loyalties and reshaped homes. Their adjustment, or resistance, often mirrors generational shifts. Younger Indians, steeped in therapy culture and the language of chosen families, may be more willing to hold expansive ideas of kinship than their parents. Yet their voices remain largely absent from public conversation. 

“Indian families tend to privilege adult narratives of respectability over children’s inner conflicts, which are too often dismissed as temporary,” says Mumbai-based psychologist Prachi Rao. 

Bala adds, “Kids are usually kept in the dark about what’s happening, and that can be really upsetting. Adults don’t realise that even something as small as shifting furniture — which seems insignificant to many — can be deeply distressing for children.”  

Rao continues, “We continue to imagine children as adjusting, rather than as active participants in reshaping the meaning of family on their own terms.” 

A 2020 review of youth stigma in India found that children from non-traditional families, including remarried families, were more likely to face teasing or exclusion at school. Even when families adapt internally, children often carry the weight of difference into public spaces, where silence can harden into exclusion.

The quiet conflicts inside blended families in India

For step-parents, child custody in India remains almost unreachable. In 2018, the Delhi High Court confirmed that step-parents cannot be natural guardians, reinforcing the law’s bias toward biology. More recent Supreme Court rulings echoed the same for custody disputes, even as divorce in India and remarriage are no longer treated as disqualifications. 

“WE CONTINUE TO IMAGINE CHILDREN AS ADJUSTING, RATHER THAN AS ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS IN RESHAPING THE MEANING OF FAMILY ON THEIR OWN TERMS” — Prachi Rao

Advocate Shalini Nigam notes that under Hindu Minority and Guardianship Act, the terms “father” and “mother” exclude step-parents. “The law still speaks only in blood, not in bonds,” she says.  

Inheritance law repeats the exclusion. Under the Hindu Succession Act, inheritance rights in India stop short of recognising stepchildren unless they are formally adopted. Bhansali recalls how this bias crept into her own life, “When my grandfather’s property was being divided, relatives quietly suggested that I would get less because I wasn’t my stepmother’s ‘real’ daughter.”

For queer families, the absence of recognition is even more acute, with partners and non-biological caregivers denied parental status despite daily caregiving. Adoption too remains bottlenecked, with CARA’s data (Central Adoption Resource Authority) showing demand outstrips availability. NCRB (National Crime Records Bureau) records meanwhile show a steady rise in custody disputes tied to remarriage, underlining how changing Indian families are colliding with outdated law. 

Bhansali’s experience highlights the erosion that sets in when a blended family is marked by conflict. “My dad’s remarriage tied us up in legal battles that’ve lasted over a decade. We’ve lost money, but more than that we’ve lost peace. Festivals that should have brought us together feel heavy, everyone keeping their distance, being asked to stay away from cousins my own age. It’s isolating, and instead of helping us move on, the law keeps the conflict alive.”

For others, the path isn’t defined by conflict but by the slow work of building trust.

Parenting beyond bloodlines

In the story of modern parenting in India, blended families are not marginal. They are central to how intimacy, trust and belonging are being rewritten.

“There’s a lot of unlearning when it comes to ideas of conditional and unconditional love,” says Bala. “To make that journey with an adult who isn’t your biological parent tests everything society tells us about blood being thicker than water and sometimes what emerges is entirely new.” 

At her wedding both her mother and stepmother gave her away, a moment she describes as “everything we had built together.”

 Even when emotional bonds solidify, bureaucracy can lag behind.  “You show up fully yet there are small reminders that you’re not the ‘real’ parent like when a school form needs a signature,” adds Gaurika.

For others, like Zareer Vandrewalla, 39, a vehicle engineer,  the challenge was less about stigma and more about personal adaptation. “If I had taken stereotypes seriously, it might have been harder. For me the real challenge was adjusting personally to new relationships, not managing society’s opinion.” 

For step-parents, the work lies in carrying uncertainty each day. “The hardest part is knowing when to step in and when to step back,” says Virat, a 52-year-old stepfather in Delhi. “It’s a space where love never feels straightforward, and that tension doesn’t ease until you start redefining what family means for yourself.”

Having grown up in a divorced family and later a blended home, Sharma says families will move beyond halfway modernity only when they value the act of staying. “Curiosity and openness are what make relationships possible. Otherwise, it feels like what we’re navigating is invisible.”