Yikes! LeAnn Rimes Calls Her Lover Eddie Cibrian's Kids, 'My Boys.' Is She Totally Crossing The Line?

The singer/actress has taken to Twitter to defend herself against claims that she’s trying to replace the boys’ mom, Brandi Glanville. But is she doing anything wrong by claiming her boyfriend’s sons as her own?

LeAnn Rimes has been dating Eddie Cibrian for close to 18 months, but when she referred to his two sons, Mason, 7, and Jake, 3, as “my boys,” was she trying to shove their mom, Eddie’s ex-wife Brandi Glanville, out of the picture? Or was LeAnn, 27, just showing how much the boys mean to her and how protective she is of her boyfriend’s kids?

“Please remember those ‘boys’ have a Mother,” a fan wrote to her on Twitter. “It seems you don’t give credit to that.”

“I do,” LeAnn replied, “but it doesn’t mean I can’t share our happiness. Please remember I’m a part of their lives too. Seems people don’t give credit to that.”

“It’s a very sensitive subject,” Dr. Susan Abbott, a child psychiatrist at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, tells HollywoodLife.com exclusively. “Someone can be hurt in this situation and it doesn’t really matter who, because tension will be felt throughout the family system. If the couple has been together for a long time, as [Eddie and LeAnn] have, then it might be OK, assuming she’s been very involved in the kids’ lives to a great extent.”

The big question, according to Dr. Abbott, is where Brandi, the boys’ mother, stands on the idea. “How on board is she? It can be very disruptive and test a child’s loyalties, but it also really depends on the parents’ relationship with each other, the stage of the breakup of the old family unit and the build up of the new one.”

Eddie, 37, shares custody of the boys with his ex-wife, who filed for divorce last year after he hooked up with LeAnn on the set of their Lifetime movie, Northern Lights. Before filing for divorce, Brandi accused LeAnn of being a “stalker,” but we’re assuming the bitterness she felt over the breakup of her marriage has cooled somewhat as she recently let the boys move into LeAnn’s home with their dad.

Dr. Abbott prefers to think that LeAnn had the best of intentions when she referred to Mason and Jake as her own. “Taken out of context, of course, it’s hard to judge,” she said. “It could be seen as showing how much she values the boys. Or it could be seen as thoughtless or hurtful, but I’m sure she didn’t mean it that way.”