Five and a half years ago, I became a stepmom. I had two young adult children from my first marriage and my husband gifted me with three wonderful, young adult bonus children and one very angry fourteen year old boy, Junior.
Four months into our marriage, my rose colored glasses came off and my delusions of being the next best Carol Brady dissolved into thin air. In 2007, Junior acted out in ways that created chaos, drama, and intense conflict. You name it, he did it – damaging property, pathological lying, and intentional manipulation. Junior had no idea how to process his anger, deal with his emotions, or communicate with adults when he was in distress.
I grew up a step kid so I thought I could deal with whatever Junior threw my way. Not only that, but I successfully raised my own two children without being sent to prison. Teenagers are a rough crowd and, even rougher, if they’re reliving the emotional pain of their parents’ divorce over and over again.
To say Junior was not easy is an understatement, but the day I realized I was oozing hostility like Zombie puss was the day I realized something had to give. And that something was me. I had to be the one to change because Junior wasn’t changing anytime soon.
I became a Savvy Stepmom by implementing Five Easy Steps to Effective Change:
Step 1: Be clear and specific about what you want to accomplish
As a breast cancer survivor, I know first-hand how damaging stress and high conflict are to my physical body. Reducing stress and not engaging in Junior’s turmoil was my first priority. I communicated my concerns and needs to my husband and, together, we worked out a strategy on how to deal with Junior in a creative way.
Step 2: Take baby steps
I know that change doesn’t happen over night and there are no magic pills. After arming myself with information on ADHD, effects of divorce on children, and a solid parenting strategy suggested by Kevin Leman in his book, Have a New Kid by Friday Workbook: How to Change Your Child’s Attitude, Behavior and Character in 5 Days, I knew that things might get worse before they got better. I also knew that I had to commit to small and consistent baby steps every day. The strategy that I started with was to simply not react when Junior was purposely trying to create chaos. If he behaved badly, either my husband or I would dispassionately send him to his room until he could behave appropriately.
Step 3: Celebrate often
Every time I dealt with Junior dispassionately and didn’t wrap myself around the axle because he was in a crazy making mode, I celebrated! Whether it was my own little happy dance out of Junior’s eye sight, a high-5 between me and my husband, or just my own inner cheerleader waving her pom-poms. I celebrated every victorious baby step forward!
Step 4: Be flexible
Three steps forward, two steps back is still forward progress. I had to change my thoughts around success and failure. I committed to simply doing my best at reducing Junior related stress. Some days were better than others. I celebrated the good days and practiced self-care on the off-days!
Step 5: Remember that change is a process, not an end result
The only constant is change. In learning how to dispassionately deal with Junior’s mean-ager antics, I not only effected change in me, but also in my husband and in Junior. Once Junior realized he could no longer spin either of us to the moon, for the most part, he stopped. My behavior had to change before his behavior changed. I followed a process and I continue to follow this process when I see that I need to make changes in my life.
Is there something in your stepfamily life that you tried to change but you weren’t successful?
- What was the change you wanted to effect?
- What steps did you take to make it happen?
- What obstacles or challenges did you face?
- What feelings or emotions came up while you were trying to effect change?
- Looking back, can you list two or three things that you could have done differently?
Twitter: KimberlyEnglot
says:
What a great article, Peggy! I have no experience with this kind of situations whatsoever, but I love how you broke it down into steps AND I really love where you said to reconsider your definition of success and failure. I apply that to my own life trials, and it makes a HUGE difference. Celebrate the baby steps!
Twitter: deanaryan
says:
Hi Peggy – Love your article! You got me thinking about something and I’d love to get your thoughts on this. A friend of mine has a great relationship with her stepmom. Her dad remarried when my friend was a teenager. I asked recently why she thought it was that they have such a great relationship.
She said that her dad had done a great job of introducing her to the idea of him dating the woman that would ultimately become her stepmom. She said he started out talking about her casually. Then showed her a picture of her and ultimately they met over dinner at a restaurant. She said she was completely prepared not to like her, but by the end of the meal, she was already starting to like her.
What are your thoughts on how to introduce a new person to your kids so as to reduce resistance from the kids? I think this can be such a tricky thing to do and I’d love to hear your thoughts on it.
Thanks!
Deana
Twitter: toolboxgirl
says:
Hi Deana,
The experts always advise to go slow. In my case, our kids were older (with the exception of Junior) and Rick and I knew each other from high school so it’s not like we just met each other online. I think the adults in the relationship need to be mindful of both their relationship and their kids. Rick and I introduced each other to each other’s kids when we both knew we were in it for the long side of forever. And for us, that was a relatively short period of time. We were lucky – we experienced no resistance from his kids or my kids. And when we introduced my girls to his girls (after we got engaged), we were hoping for polite civility. We were aware and recognized that just because we were getting married didn’t mean our girls had to like each other. Turns out it was as if we reconnected long lost cosmic quadruplets.
There is no one right way to introduce kids to a new partner but there are a lot of wrong ways. My best advice is to go slow, talk about it at an age appropriate level (what we did with young adults may not be the best for younger children), be honest, keep the lines of communication open, and try not to do what my dad did…send an email announcing he got married to a woman no one in the family had met…
Twitter: deanaryan
says:
That’s quite a way to make a wedding announcement! Thanks for the tips for a more gentle approach.
Twitter: TheWilderZone
says:
Hey Ladies…loving this conversation, and I just had to jump in, because my honey and I were faced with the same question of how best to introduce me to his two boys when we were dating.
Glenn and his ex already had an agreement in place that neither would introduce the kids to anyone they were dating until they’d been together for six months. So that part was already decided, but that still left room for a gazillion questions about how best to move forward from there.
The first few times I met the boys it was for an outing of some kind…neutral territory and short in duration….mini-golf, pizza out…that kind of thing.
Then we gradually moved up to me coming over to the house, but again…for short spans at first…dinner, or a movie.
It was several months before I stayed over, and even after I moved in full-time, we made it a point to protect Glenn’s one-on-one time with the boys. He only had them every other weekend and we didn’t want them to feel as though now that I was in the picture, all time with Dad would include me.
For about the first year that we were living together, at least one night of every weekend that he had them, I would go stay overnight at my mom’s. It gave me time with my mother that I really enjoyed, and ensured that the boys still got plenty of alone time with Dad.
Even now, five years later, I’ll often graciously decline an invitation to the movies or dinner or some other event so that they can have their “guy” time.
I love all the tips you’ve shared here, Peggy. Blending families comes with many blessings, but can also be very challenging, especially in the early days as everyone is getting to know one another. Thanks so much for so openly sharing your experiences and what’s worked for you.
Twitter: toolboxgirl
says:
Hi Lisa and thanks for stopping by and sharing your experience! My husband was the custodial parent for Junior, so I often encouraged alone time between him and his youngest son. Junior craved attention…his, mine, the dog’s…and I also carved out one-on-one time with my stepson. Kickboxing was our thing to do together and it really helped us develop our relationship.
Peggy
Twitter: mysteplifenet
says:
Hi Gloria, I wish I had read that essay in the very early days of dating my DH, and that as we moved into a committed relationship, we had used it as a roadmap for success. But like many re-marrying couples, we just blithely charged ahead, fingers crossed and hoping for the best. We made mistakes. We had really difficult times and some horrible fights. I experienced profound pain, despair, disappointment and sometimes I wanted to give up. 10 years later, things are going pretty well. Time helped, but we also worked very hard. Hubby and I worked on our relationship, I saw a counselor for a couple years, and I put in thousands of hours reading books about communication, conflict, marriage, re-marriage, parenting co-parenting and step-parenting. I listed communication and conflict first because that’s where I put most of my time, and I think that studying those topics has enhanced my job as a human resource professional. If I hadn’t been a part of this family, I would have lost out on that self-study. Thanks again for sharing the article.
Twitter: toolboxgirl
says:
Hi Krista,
I loved Gloria’s response to my article. And like I said, I wish more stepfamilies would read her book, no matter what stage of family making they’re in. Becoming a stepfamily is all about the practice, the time, the consistent effort of all the things Gloria pointed out. It’s about taking baby steps to effect transformational change. And it takes the effort of both the husband and the wife.
Thanks for taking the time to stop by today!
Peggy
Twitter: GLINTERMANS
says:
Wonderful article, Peggy. Much thanks for sharing your useful and important insights. We in the stepfamily community often wonder why some stepfamilies thrive while other crash and burn. I’ve written an article on this and would like to share it here. It is a bit long, but hopefully will be found to be helpful.
In any stepfamily at least three people are struggling to form new family relationships while still coping with reminders of the past. Each family member brings expectations and attitudes that are as diverse as the personalities involved. Creating a successful stepfamily, as with any family, is easier for all when each member tries to understand the feelings and motivations of the others as well as their own. Ideally, discuss the realities of living in a stepfamilybefore the marriage.
What can you do? Plan ahead. Look carefully at your motives, and those of your future spouse, for wanting to get married. Get to know him or her as well as possible under all sorts of circumstances. Consider the possible impact of contrasting lifestyles. If your lifestyles clash, the children are the ones caught in the middle. Discuss how your lives will change by bringing two families together. What do you agree and disagree on when it comes to your concept of child-rearing.
Talk honestly with your children about the changes this marriage will bring: new living arrangements, new family relationships, and how this will affect their relationship with their non-custodial parent. Give your children ample opportunity to get to know your future spouse well. Consider your children’s feelings, but don’t allow them to make your decision about remarriage.
Discuss the disposition of family finances with your future spouse. An open and honest review of financial assets and responsibilities may reduce unrealistic expectations and misunderstandings. Understand that there are bound to be periods of doubt, frustration, and resentment.
Any marriage is complex and challenging, but the problems of stepfamilies are more complicated because more people, relationships, feelings, attitudes, and beliefs are involved than in a first marriage. Because its members have not shared past experiences, the new family may have to redefine rights and responsibilities to fit your individual and combined needs. Time and understanding are key allies in negotiating the transition from single-parent to stepfamily status.
In a good stepfamily every member is treated with dignity, care, and respect (initially love may not be in the equation). A healthy step or biological family is one in which each person feels the support to grow to his or her full potential.
If you have already jumped into the role of stepmother or father, the following three points can ease the transition process for everyone and give you breathing space as you continue to explore and use the ideas presented in this book.
Help stepchildren to get over their loss (the divorce or death of a parent) if they have not yet (it takes about two years). Or, perhaps, regardless of the time lapsed, they have not been able to because there was no environment of emotional support and trust in which they could have their feelings and come to terms with the “I wish I had(s)” or feelings that they somehow caused the divorce (as children commonly feel). They need a climate of emotional safety to not only express, but acknowledge their feelings rather than just blindly acting out with rage. They need to heal their loss before they can move on emotionally to creating and being part of a new stepfamily. You see your new marriage as completing your life, but a child may see it as something which will take away from theirs. You see it as a plus; they see it as a minus.
It is more important to develop a relationship of caring, communication, and respect with a stepchild than to hope for or expect instant love. Love takes time; it must grow. Be real with your emotions. What you resist persists, what you accept lightens. Encourage your children and stepchildren to be real about their feelings. Set limits on behavior, not feelings; for example, you cannot allow them to act out their anger by burning down the house, but you can let them express their feelings that they wish this new “family” didn’t exist.
Let your relationship with stepchildren develop gradually. Don’t expect too much too soon—from the children or yourself. Children need time to adjust, accept, and belong. So do parents. Don’t try to replace a lost parent; be an additional parent. Children need time to mourn the parent lost through divorce or death. Expect to deal with confusing feelings—your own, your spouse’s, and the children’s. Anxiety about new roles and relationships may heighten the competition among family members for love and attention as loyalties are questioned. Children may need to understand that their relationship with you is valued but different from your relationship with your new spouse and that one cannot replace the other. You love and need them both, but in different ways.
Help the child that goes back and forth between parents.Their lives are full of good-byes. Help children accept painful feelings so that these feelings can become smaller and more manageable. Let yourself and your children feel, so that everyone can heal. An idealized expectation becomes a prison while accepting the truth will set you free. If you are marrying into an existing family, TV and movies may have helped create unrealistic expectations of what a family is and how it functions. What it is not is a fairy tale of politeness and caring.
Why Most Stepfamilies Fail
One in three typical stepfamilies do succeed, long term. In order to find out how to accomplish this, you must be willing to first explore why most stepfamilies break apart. There seem to be five interlinked reasons why most average stepfamilies crash, often within 10 years.
1.The adults in many stepfamilies seem to come from families which were, to some degree, less than functional. Without awareness and personal growth, these adults unconsciously pass similar emotional traits on to their kids, repeating and spreading a cycle of unreasonable need and an inability to get these needs met.
2.Most stepparents resist fully accepting that they are forming a multi-home stepfamily, which will differ in over 60 ways from the one-home biological family they are used to. To make matters worse, many people overtly or unconsciously associate “step-” with failure, wicked, unnatural, second-best, and inferior. They do not want to learn about stepfamilies, let alone be one. This ignorance can be fatal, both as a partner and parent. Typical multi-home stepfamilies are amazingly complex and often take five to eight years, or more, to stabilize. Many unaware, love-dazed couples expect it will all come together in five to eight months.
3.One or more new-stepfamily kids or adults are often blocked in mourning their agonizing prior losses. Every remarriage follows traumatic endings from previous divorce or death. Remarriage and/or cohabiting cause more major losses (and gains). Parents who did not see their parents grieve well, regardless of why they were grieving, can’t grieve themselves. How could they have taught you how to grieve. They repressed and avoided intense sadness and/or rage, and so were stressed and ruled by these emotions for years. Incomplete grief promotes crippling addictions and illnesses, nourishes post-divorce hostilities, splits biological kids emotionally between warring ex-mates, and prevents even adult step-kids from accepting the kindest of stepparents. Blocked mourning has clear symptoms. Once recognized, frozen grief can be thawed, over time.
4.For most, the decision to remarry is made in a shared, wonderfully distorted state-of-mind: romantic love. Combined with the illusion that stepfamilies are not all that different from biological families, these distortions often cloud an awareness of what the couple is really undertaking, and what practical preparations they should make. Sobering divorce statistics imply that almost three of four stepfamily adults marry the wrong people, for the wrong reasons, and at the wrong time. They commit to mutual illusions.
5.The final reason for such widespread re-divorce is that our media and most communities offer little or no informed, effective support for remarried people and their kids. There are few or no stepfamily co-parenting classes, support groups, newsletters, or aware counselors. Few clergy, teachers, therapists, mediation lawyers and judges, or medical professionals know how different, complex, and risky multi-home stepfamilies are. Stepfamily re-divorce seems to be a social-science black hole, though so many remarriages involving prior kids are highly stressful and ultimately fail.
Why Do Some Stepfamilies Survive
However, since roughly one out of four stepfamilies do survive—even thrive—we know that stepfamilies can grow the safety, support, warm closeness, strength, and comfort that only healthy families provide. The following, explored in detail throughout this book, can insure your success:
•Each adult must learn the symptoms, if any, of their own troubled childhood. You must identify your major destructive emotional traits and evolve a self-motivated, high-priority personal plan for healing. You must commit to it, and begin. Next, evaluate the odds that your prospective partner may have troubling emotional traits. If so, unless they are aware of their problems and are in solid recovery, settle for friendship.
•You must assess, as a couple, how well you accept and resolve conflicts with each other and key others. Learn and steadily work to develop important verbal skills: talking about how you communicate, empathic listening, effective assertion, and problem solving. Learn to manage your inner and personal conflicts. The emotional highs of new love can disguise deep disagreement on parenting, money, family priorities, and home management, i.e., values that will surface after the wedding.
•Together, accept your prospective identity as a normal, unique, multi-home stepfamily versus “We’re just a family” (with unreasonable expectations). Then, stepfamily adults and kids (minor and grown) can try to agree on who belongs in it. You need to admit and resolve strong disagreements, well enough for positive results.
•Learn how your stepfamily differs from typical biological families, and the related typical stepfamily myths. Then, discuss realistic expectations for each of your many marriage and family roles. Be realistic, because without steady work on these, you and your kids will in all probability divorce within seven to 10 years.
•You and your partner must learn the five stages of healthy grieving, and the specific symptoms of incomplete grief. Then run a check on yourself, your partner, and each child, for major prior losses. If anyone is seriously blocking mourning their unique losses, you and your partner (including ex-mates) must agree on a plan to deal with that. And you must act on your plan. Consider specifically what each child and adult will lose with your marriage and living together. Evolve a clear policy for good grief and use it to guide and support all of you through your inevitable life losses.
•You and your partner should (separately) explore the following questions honestly: Why should I remarry? Why now? Why this person and their kids, ex (if not their first marraige)? If I have to, can I often put this adult ahead of my own kids without major resentment or guilt? (Stepfamily parents are inevitably forced to choose and often.) Can my partner do that?
•After the wedding, merge and stabilize your two biological families’ assets, beliefs, habits, values, rituals, priorities, and lifestyles. Everyone in your new multi-home stepfamily must give up some cherished things and accept new things. Support each other in mourning key personal losses.
•Consistently resolve the many values and loyalty conflicts that will result from your marriage. The most important and dramatic conflict of all needs to be mastered. Each parent must decide whose needs usually come first with them, their partner’s or their children’s. To protect your kids from another divorce trauma, you might need to put your marriage first. Also, clarify whose needs control each of your stepfamily’s homes. Learn how to problem-solve effectively together.
•Evolve and use a stepfamily goal plan. Stabilize your stepfamily roles. Revise most of your old biological family roles. Evolve new intra- and inter-home rules for these roles that everyone can accept well enough. Help each other admit and grieve key personal losses along the way.
•You must consistently balance and co-manage all of these tasks, plus a myriad of other responsibilities well enough on a daily basis to: build a solid, high-priority marriage; enjoy your kids; and, to keep growing emotionally and spiritually as individual people. And, don’t forget to laugh, play, and relax together along the way.
Know and take comfort in the fact that well-run by knowledgeable, confidant stepfamily adult teams (not simply couples), this modern version of an ancient family form can provide the warmth, comfort, inspiration, support, security—and often (not always) the love—that adults and kids long for.
Gloria Lintermans is the author of THE SECRETS TO STEPFAMILY SUCCESS: Revolutionary Tools to Create a Blended Family of Support and Respect, http://amzn.to/stepfamily
Twitter: toolboxgirl
says:
Hi Gloria,
I honestly wish more stepfamilies would read your book. As I skim through the forums I see so much emotional baggage. How women stand behind the words “supposed to” and “should.” What I see is a lot of illusory thinking. For example, “you should love his kids like your own” (but I don’t. Thanks for that unreasonable expectation).
Another thing I see is that stepcouples aren’t willing to practice being a stepfamily. The stats are out there that it takes an average of 7 years to became a stepfamily. But no one says why or HOW. Do you just wait the time out? I see a lot of women writing, “but we’ve been married 10 years and we’re still not blended.” That’s because no one is practicing.
After reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers,” I learned the 10,000 hour rule. If a stepfamily were to practice (communication, relating, responding rather than reacting, setting boundaries, loving each other etc) an average of 4 hours a day, they would become an expert stepfamily in 7 years. (I did the math, 4 hours a day comes out to 10,220 hours – and there’s your 7 years)
Becoming a successful stepfamily or a savvy stepmom isn’t rocket science but it isn’t magic either. It’s about awareness and good, honest inner and outer work. I’m finding there’s not a lot of couples willing to put in the time or the consistent effort.
And that’s sad.