Saturday, February 17, 2007

Making Blended Families Work

Divorce is prominent in our American society, and what is just as prevalent are mixed families with yours, mine and ours kids, or just "yours" kids. Second marriages are just as likely, if not more likely to end in divorce, and one of the main reasons revolves around the difficulty of parenting as a step-parent.

There are many more challenges to making a blended family and even more issues and problems than in the traditional nuclear family. First and foremost, there are the non-residential parent issues. When children go on their visits with their non-residential parent, there are often occasions for that parent to either provide negative thoughts and feelings toward the new step-parent, or worse create tension for all parties out in the open. Secondly, there are issues with trying to effectively parent as a step-parent. Many times there is resentment coming from the child to the step-parent and often times, the anger and resentment is misdirected. Its important to recognize all the issues and attempt to work through them all with the entire family.

There are many resources out there that can help give families to tools to survive together as a blended family, here are just a few:

http://www.apahelpcenter.org/articles/article.php?id=41
http://www.helpguide.org/mental/blended_families_stepfamilies.htm
http://www.blended-families.com/

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Another issue that parents in blended families face is the presence of gremlins in their lives. What’s a gremlin? It’s that nasty little voice behind your back that keeps on feeding you with negative and sabotaging words about your character and the way you should react to different situations in your life and preventing you from being the best step-parent that you can be.

I invite you to a Live 60-minute call-in Teleseminar on Thursday, July 31st, 6PM Pacific / 9PM Eastern. With Jane Massengill as the resource person. She will talk about the gremlins in our life. Ask Jane for some advice on how to tame that gremlin. Please visit Blended-Families.com to be able to participate in the call for free.