Image: Courtesy
A blended family offers a new chance for love and family, but it is also an attempt to bring various parents and siblings into co-existence.
This can lead to numerous challenges of identity confusion among younger kids, sibling rivalry, financial difficulties, and jealousy but with every challenge in life, there is a solution for those who are willing to find one.
Here are ways to make a blended family work;
- At first, let the biological parent be the primary disciplinarian
Discipline without connection is deemed as punishment. For the first year let the step-parent bond a little more with the child. Owing to their close relationship, the child doesn't read much into it compared to if he or she was disciplined by the step-parent. As the bond grows between the two grows and the child starts feeling more comfortable, the roles might switch depending on what works for your family.
- Strive to create a personal relationship with youth stepchildren
Create alone time with your partner's kids - this will strengthen your relationship.
Get to know them, their likes, and their dislikes take them out for treats, and care for them as your own. With time the relationship between the two of you grows into more of a confidant type of relationship.
- Collaborate with your ex-lover
The relationship becomes easier if you do not exclude your ex-partner from your plans with his or her child.
Remember that you and your ex-partner did not dissolve your relationship, rather, you transformed it from an intimate, emotional bond to one that is anchored by shared objectives for your kids.
Your children will benefit much from your joining with your ex, putting aside your angry sentiments out of selflessness, and letting go of the hurt of betrayal or a dysfunctional past.
Treating your ex-spouse badly, hurting them for revenge, ruining their relationship with your kids, or excluding them develops into a habit that makes you do the same to your children.
- Come up with a well-structured plan of how you going to manage your family affairs
By failing to prepare, you're preparing to fail, a plan enhances accountability and the spirit of cooperation.
Since you're becoming a unit the involved adults should come up with a plan that constitutes of; the role each parent will play in parenting and facilitating the development of any children, the division of chores among the kids, goals on financial planning, what kind of access the extended family will have with the kids.
- Step into your kid's shoes
Children who live as part of a successful blended family have access to not just their biological parents, but also step-parents, new siblings, step-grandparents as well as the wider family.
The children go through a lot and you as the adults need to step in and understand them and how fast or slow they process things. For a blended family to work the kids must be the main beneficiaries of the relationship.
Put them first and consider how they feel for them to grow into mentally healthy individuals.
There will always be steps you can take toward unity in your blended family. You will make one step at a time! –Donna Houpe.
Read Also:
