About the Author

Terri P. Smith, author of When Your Parent Remarries Late in Life, addresses remarriage of mature parents from her personal experience and through dozens of interviews where she discovered healing ways that unite the family with acceptance, love, and happiness. Death, divorce, and remarriage of aging parents are some of life’s most challenging experiences. “Sometimes these events injure relationships, healing is often needed,” Terri said.

While Terri was pregnant with her fifth child, her mother died. Only seven months later her father remarried. Feeling betrayed, alone, depressed, and an entire whirl of emotions, she turned to friends, who are also adult stepchildren, and learned that she was not alone. Determined to find a way to heal the hurt she felt, Terri interviewed dozens of people in similar situations who had found ways to heal their pain and love the new family members.

“Soon people started coming out of the woodwork.” Terri states, “Everywhere I went–the dentist’s office, the bookstore, businesses–people told me about their parents’ remarriage and how they were dealing with it.” In When Your Parent Remarries Late in Life, Terri shares insights gleaned from these profoundly frank interviews. Clinical research supports her findings of behaviors that build loving relationships.

Joining Terri as a technical reviewer is James M. Harper, Ph.D., a marriage and family therapist with over 25 years of clinical experience and a professor of family sciences and marriage and family therapy at

Brigham Young University. Dr. Harper’s expertise sheds additional light and support of the behaviors discussed in When Your Parent Remarries Late in Life. Dr. Harper earned his Ph.D. at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, MN (1979) majoring in Counseling Psychology with a supporting program in Communications, Family Social Science, and Anthropology.

Terri P. Smith earned a BA in communications at

Brigham Young University. She worked in the press office of the U.S. Senate Labor and Human Resources Committee for four years. She has spent the past 22 years as a wife and mother raising four children.

Contact information

Email:  terrip_smith@yahoo.com

Phone: 801-226-3157

Comments