How is it that, the stories of the evil step mother/father who torture their step children and end up killing them, are that common?

Do we really have that many mentally unstable people in the world? Imagine you choose to be in a relationship with someone who has kids, but you hate the kids because they are from someone else and decide to take revenge... It is like beyond any logic.. It makes me sick, especially that I am sure if I were ever to be in that situation, I would probably even overcompensate in the way I treat that kid knowing they are without a mother, or knowing they probably naturally don't like me or are afraid of me. It is beyond me that someone would kill a child because of such reason.

The more I watch these episodes the more I lose my trust and become more cautious. To be honest, it may be a good thing. I think because I lived a protective life and grow up in a very small and safe country, I never learned to be vigilant.. I am too brave (in a stupid way) because I never had options or freedom to be out late, meet strangers, live alone etc. So I was never taught how to do it with safeguards.

I even sometimes forgot my door unlocked at night.. would wake up in the morning be like meh.. and that was during the time I lived downtown too! Or I would leave my door unlocked and go downstairs, if I know I am coming back soon. But what if someone gets in while I am not around? Now I am like, no.. The door needs to be locked at all times, when I am not around, and when I am inside..

Crazy world.

DrWatson · 70-79, M

In centuries past, women's mortality rate was much higher than today, largely due to deaths in childbirth. So fathers remarried fairly often. The stepmother then resented the widower's children due to anxiety about inheritance. "Surely we don't need to feed her that well, and at such expense, do we?"

Grimms' fairy tales took that to the next level, but the basis was something real.

ElwoodBlues · M

@DrWatson BBC article expanding at length on the issues of mortality & inheritance you mention:

https://www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20221118-the-myth-of-the-evil-stepmother

References can also be found in the Bible: Sarah, the matriarch who birthed Abraham’s son, cast his other children out to die so as not to dilute the inheritance pool.

Most of the popular characters that underpin modern film and literature took hold in 1812, however, when German brothers Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm first published their collection, Children's and Household Tales ...

Probably not the case in modern families though

... “Wicked stepmothers don’t show up in the data,” agrees Todd Jensen, a research assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, US, who studies relational patterns between stepparents and their stepchildren.

antonioio · 70-79, M

when my mother died she left 7 of us after her, with the eldest was only 10
my dad married a few later and we ended up with the best step mother ever