Developing a Relationship with your Step-child

In the beginning, don't expect your step-children to immediately view you as their parent, love you, or even like you. Your spouse chose you. The children did not. Your initial role as a step-parent is best approached as one of a housemate and emotional supporter of the biological parent. The less you try to "take the place" of their absent parent, the less hostile resistance you will encounter from the child. Relationship development takes time and patience. There are basically 4 steps and it's not necessary to even get past #2 in order to function as a family. If you can accept and trust each other, peace can be had. The 4 steps are:

1. Acceptance
2. Trust
3. Friendship
4. Love

Early in the marriage, discover what your step-children's special interests are and become interested in those things. Start conversations with them about things they're interested in. Volunteer to assist or become involved in their hobbies or sports, but only with their permission. You will only gain their respect by respecting their feelings and boundaries. This leads to acceptance of your presence in the family. Over time, as the children learn that you're not there to wreak havoc all over their lives, trust will begin to develop. If both step-parent and step-child are into it, the other steps will likely follow.

You may find that you don't like or despise one of your step-children... not uncommon. My mistake was believing I was a bad person for hating a child. It was a devastating self-discovery for me. Even though I understood (or kind of did) why she was the way she was, I despised her. I hated that my husband and I fought about her. I hated that all the damage her prior mothers had done to her was cast off on me. I hated that her name is similar to mine. I hated that she went out of her way to make life intolerable. I hated that her mother abandoned her because that meant there was no where I could send her away to. I eventually hated the sound of her voice. The more I talked with other people about my particular situation with my step-daughter, the more I realized I was normal, because everyone disliked her. No one I talked to knew how to handle her or would have put up with her. I truly had The Step-daughter From Hell. We tried family counseling, couples counseling, individual counseling for her, behavior modification techniques... you name it. She turned my world upside down for years. In the midst of hating myself for hating her, I became angry inside, resentful, and extremely depressed.

Somehow, I lived through it long enough to get where I could tolerate being in the same room with her (it took years). Then, at some point I realized that sometimes I enjoyed her company. By that time, she was also actually trying for us to get along. Later, I discovered to my amazement that I loved her... even though I didn't always like her and still hated her choices in life. Miracles do happen.

My best advice for troubled step-parents is to hang in there if you believe your marriage is worth it. Be open to counseling and behavior modification tricks all that stuff. My step-daughter was extreme, so just because it didn't help me much doesn't mean it won't help you. Take advantage of any and all resources available to help you and have someone outside your step-family you can talk to.

The best advice I ever got from a counselor was a trick: If you feel your step-kid's behavior is not being addressed by his or her parent, back off from the issue and say nothing for awhile. Miraculously, your spouse will balance that out by becoming more harsh with discipline. It also works the other way around.

The Step-Family Identity

One aspect of being a blended family is that you'll never have the "ideal"/original family type (two parents, kids, no ex-spouses or ex-in-laws involved) unless all exes are out of the picture. Even though that might be ideal for you, the kids are better off in the long run if they are involved with their other parent. Family identity is not something I thought about much before we married, but as the years went by with me waiting for the ideal family to emerge, I thought more often about what would make me happier and a big part of it was wanting to feel like one family even though in many ways we'll always be two. I've spent many envious moments eyeing the local "nuclear" families wishing mine could have worked... but what I've got isn't one. SO... that being said, what you need to do is create your own new family identity.

In order to mesh as a family and create an identity as one, what you choose to be your new family traditions becomes important. Incorporating traditions of your former family is fine, as long you create new ones unique to your new family also. The most significant tradition my husband and I created was to go to a Christmas tree farm every December as a family, choose a tree everyone agrees on, and let all the kids take turns sawing the tree down. They have loved this even in their teen years. Our ex-spouses use fake trees every year, so this is unique to our new family.

Eating dinner together at the table on a regular basis will help bond the family, and having particular family dinners that everyone likes can add a unique aspect to your new family as well. My step-children found some of my cooking to be well to their liking, with things their mother didn't cook, and my husband cooks French toast that one of my sons thinks is absolutely to die for. Also, anytime I try a new recipe that everyone likes, it becomes unique to our new family.

Inside family jokes and humorous experiences also help create a family identity. Our family members all have an extraordinary sense of humor (Thank God... I don't know how we'd have made it this far otherwise). Personality quirks, fears, and obsessions open the door for many memories over the years. One of my sons had alien-phobia from the ages of 3 to about 13, opening the door for pranks, practical jokes, and funny experiences. My step-daughter with Downs Syndrome dropped her fork during dinner about 6 years ago and leaned down and asked the fork, "You all right?" My sons have never forgotten that. She also argues with her Barbie dolls frequently and just recently told Barbie, "You're not the boss of me." We all enjoy eavesdropping on her Barbie conversations.

It has taken me many years to fully realize and accept that our family identity will never be as ideal as I wish it could be. We'll always be two families in many ways, my husband spending weekends at his daughter's bowling and baseball games and babysitting his granddaughter, me spending my weekends at my sons' various sports events. Once in a blue moon, there will be no weekends demands and we may take off camping all together (another tradition our kids don't have with their other parents), but mostly we attend our kids' events without each other due to conflicting activities.

With traditions and memories as a family, the times when you hardly see one another and the times when it seems like no one is getting along will feel more like "normal" aspects of a family rather than reasons not to be a family at all.

So be creative! Come up with your own new stuff unique to your new family.

Hindsight 20/20

I wish in the beginning that I'd done more research on blended families. I did some. But not nearly enough. I also wish I'd known more about my husband's parenting style and spending habits on his kids and that we'd agreed or compromised on more things ahead of time, but that's totally my fault.

I hope to be of some aid to blended families in distress or maybe just someone you can relate to so you don't think you're the only step-parent that's ever lived in a war zone at home or that's ever packed your bags time and again only to decide you'd stay, if for no other reason than to not let your troublemaking step-kid win. Newlyweds in step-families commonly battle over how much money to spend on their kids when the traditional money-spending habits of each parent are at opposite ends of the pole, and about discipline issues when parenting styles are opposite. You're not the only one to find no better way to lower your blood pressure than to envision (with great delight) taking a baseball bat to everything in your step-kid's bedroom either. Obviously, rebellious teenagers who hate your guts aren't fun, nor are the ex-spouses, and later on when the ex-spouses remarry you get to put up with their new spouses. Why on earth could I not see the looming disaster before I said "I do?"

I survived the war zone era, but not without emotional casualties. Even with the most difficult one of our 4 kids grown and out of the house for the last five years (well, in and out), issues with her and between my husband and I still loom. He has 2 kids, and I have 2 kids. Thankfully, we did not have any together. I can't say for sure if I'd still have married my husband if I'd known what lay ahead, but most of the time, we do okay now. My husband and I still love each other, all the kids love us both, we love all of them (usually), and our family has nearly eleven years of memories together. But it has been hard.

I knew some of the basics:

1. Only the biological parent disciplines the child.
2. The biological parent gets the final say in decisions about the child.
3. You should not put down your step-child's other parent.
4. Treat all the children as equally as possible under the circumstances. Much as you try, this will be humanly impossible.
5. Nurture your new marital relationship, which is understandably difficult with children already in existence.
6. Know the odds are against you. Subsequent marriages fail even more often than first marriages. I don't know why it's important to know that, but everything I read told me so.

And that's about the extent of my prior knowledge. Boy, have I ever learned a lot. I'll share the tips I learned from the trenches and research from the academic experts, and I plan to review books on the subject of blended families as well.

Stay tuned...