The “outside world” can be a dangerous place for children.
Another exceedingly dangerous environment for children can also be their own homes. While medicine cabinets, cleaning materials and unlocked swimming pool gates are a legitimate threat to the child-safety, the unguarded mouth of an angry adult can inflict grievous harm to a child.
A vigilant parent might install childproof locks yet leave a totally exposed web of anger in every room of the house. Unresolved anger in a parent, expressed through unpredictable displays of frustration and annoyance or rage, can quite effectively sabotage a childhood and even pass a baton of anxiety and rage to unborn generations. It is in their own homes that children might be at most in danger. At home they learn about trust, and exercise the most trust. It is at home they will learn, or fail to learn, by watching and experiencing, almost everything they will ever know about love.
It is at home they will make the most mistakes and receive the most affirmation and correction. It is at home that children will learn about fear and hurt and rejection and empathy and love and acceptance.
Children are constantly seeing, feeling, learning, trying, sometimes succeeding, sometimes failing, watching, waiting and taking it all in.
Monitoring diets is a crucial aspect of childhood health. Another “diet” is the calm, security, predictability and warmth healthy parents can provide.
If you have the opportunity to see “The King of Broken Things” run at it.
Your family – blood-, marriage, relatives-by-choice, adoption, and any other means people become family – is vastly more than a list of people on your group-chat or birthdays to try and remember or the ready-made crowd for weddings and funerals.
The hundreds of links (a family of 4 has 16 relationships) in your network – your family – and how you are linked (just right, over-connected, under-connected, loosely-affiliated, cut-off in anger, the “I’ll never talk to him/her-again” kind of connection) is of crucial importance.
How you are connected will either sustain and support and nourish you or drain and exhaust you. And, there is no escaping. Severe disconnections can wield a driving power even in a so-called non-relationship.
We are all “linked” and positioned in a variety of ways within the same extended family and so a family can nourish and support while, at the same time, it can rip to shreds and bleed someone dry.
I’d like to avoid this dramatic contrast but simply look around — listen to people’s family stories — you’ll see it is so.
We are each integral to the health (and un-health) of our family.
We are each a cell-within-the-whole.
The healthier we are, the more “just right” our connections, the more we will be nourishers and be nourished within the unique group of people we each call family.
The healthier I am will lead to a healthier “we” even if it results in hardship* along the way.
* attempts at greater health will be met with resistance from those around, especially those who’ve “benefited” from unhealthy habits and patterns.
Today, and every day, try to be the adult you hope your children will become. How else will they learn what it means to be an adult? Who else will teach them?
Try to stop blaming the teachers, coaches, or the school for your child’s every challenge, difficulty, or hurdle. Blame restricts maturing, yours and theirs.
Try to stop blaming the government, the economy, or prejudice for every distress or dilemma you face, unless you think blame will be a good tool for your child to take into adulthood. If you want your children to be adults who take responsibility for their lives then show them how it’s done. Your children won’t forget your temper tantrums no matter how young they may be; and they will probably emulate them.
Demonstrate, by your own display of excellent manners, the manner in which you hope your child will navigate life and relationships. It is true, they are going to watch and learn from multiple sources, but you are their primary resource when it comes to how they will respect and treat others. Little eyes are watching.
Respect, visit, and be kind to the elderly so they know exactly how to do it when it’s your turn.
Dismiss no one; look down on no one. Young eyes and ears are absorbing how to be in the world, and we, we parents, are the primary teachers.
Blending families, smoothly and successfully, is not easy.
Each family imports its own set of norms and expectations into the new family configuration and these norms and expectations will inevitably clash. Each person, too, brings expectations into the new family quite apart from what the rest of what his or her original family brings to the party. There will also be remaining scars from the sequence of events that made blending two families possible in the first place.
Blending families calls for super-maturity from the marrying or newly married adults.
They are called to lead in such a manner that all the members of the newly constituted family’s voices are heard and opinions are respected, irrespective of age.
The adults will be wise to avoid blaming others like a former spouse or former in-laws for the inevitable difficulties that will arise.
The adults will be wise to avoid disciplining other people’s children, even if he or she is newly married to the children’s mom or dad.
The adults will be wise to avoid believing the children – no matter what they may say when wanting to please the parent – want this new family as much as the newly married adults do.
The adults will be wise to speak well of the parents who are excluded from this new blended family.
I expect you to tell me the truth to the same degree I have told you the truth. I do not expect you to tell me everything. I know you have parts of your life that has little or even nothing to do with me. I expect and welcome this.
I do expect you to tell me things that reasonably high functioning families consider important. If it, whatever “it” is, impacts you immediately and significantly or is likely to take me by surprise now or in the future, I want to know about it. I want to know about it as soon as possible. Of course, it goes both ways!
I expect you to offer me the same degree of freedom as I have offered you. I do not treat you like room service or 911 and I want the same respect in return.
I expect you will progressively pay your own way beginning around 16. This means you will assume all the costs related to your life as you work and earn more. I hope you will continue to apply the same aptitude to creating your great future as you have to creating your great success at school. While I will always be proud of your successes, they will always be yours, not mine.
I expect you to write well, read well, and communicate well.
It’s easy to knock so-called helicopter parents – the ever-present, ever-serving, ever advocating parents who are perpetually running interference with schools and coaches, often in ways that can be stifling, even damaging the very children around whom they hover.
All behavior has meaning. Parents “helicopter” their children (I’m amused that I used “helicopter” as a verb) for deep, powerful and hidden reasons, reasons often vastly beyond simple formulae or fixes.
What I do know is that it has nothing to do with the child. I’d motivate for understanding, empathy, awareness, and acceptance for the helicopter parent. Perhaps it is fear driven. Perhaps there’s a lack of trust with that lack originating long before the child was born. Perhaps the child is regarded as a lifeline to something saner, something more tolerable than the parent has ever known. Perhaps the parent has been used and discarded in the past and is dead set on safeguarding the child so history will not be repeated. Perhaps the marriage is perched precariously on hopes of the child’s success.
There are reasons to fear, lack trust, to want a life more powerful and meaningful than the parent may have known.
Empathy, awareness, acceptance, and understanding may go a long way to secure the helicopter’s safe landing rather than the humor or rejection used to shoot it down.
I ask a woman how her life is going and she tells me about her children. She’s very forthcoming. I hear about their failures and successes and their disappointments and their accomplishments in sports.
So I ask again how she is enjoying her life and she tells me about her children’s teachers and how dedicated they are and how they go the extra mile for her sons and how much she appreciates it and how happy her sons are at school.
I persist and ask her if she has any close friends and how much time she spends with her peers and she tells me how her sons’ friendships are a little disappointing to her and that sometimes they get left off birthday party lists and how much it hurts her when that happens and how she wishes adults were more sensitive to her children.
I ask the same woman who happens to also be a wife how she is enjoying her husband and she tells me they “work together” as parents and they are almost always on the “same page.”
I press in and ask the woman if she has a life outside of being a mom and she gives me that blank look as if I have no idea what I am talking about.
When it comes to my sons, I remind myself of these things:
Their lives are larger at their ages than mine was at their ages. Of course, they’re starting late and the world is a very different place. Their platforms are more complex, and more dynamic than mine was and, I admit, I am somewhat limited in my ability to identify with it. This means I should not be taken aback when I am blinded to possibilities and experiences they see and want to embrace. Rejecting an idea or a possibility simply because I couldn’t envision it is a good way to widen a gap than is mine, and not theirs, to bridge.
While the world is a very different place than it was in my formative years, some things remain unchanged. Good manners, using please and thank you, looking people in the eye, standing up for adults, dealing honestly with money and time, working hard, and displaying empathy in the face of those who are suffering – are values that cannot be discarded just because the world is faster paced than it once was. One of my jobs as a parent is to encourage, even enforce some of these things if necessary.
I am enough for my sons and the only dad they will ever need.
My heart goes out to children who live in unsettled houses. Houses where the abuse of alcohol or drugs dominates everything. Houses where rage rips people apart.
My heart goes out to children whose parents were once together and now are apart. Although the child may have received loving messages about how they are loved despite what mother and father do it still makes no sense to the child.
My heart goes out to children who are fighting a deadly disease and to the siblings who are fighting it with them. The necessary lack of certainty bolstered with statements of faith, all within the same adult sentence, can be confusing. It’s at least as confusing for the child as it is for the adult trying to comfort them.
My heart goes out to children whose boundaries are ignored and violated and whose voices are ignored or silenced. Such children might as well be invisible to those commissioned to love and protect them.
My heart goes out to the child who must assume a defensive stance because of race, gender, or language.
My heart goes out to children who are hungry in a nation of plenty, those born outside the dominant culture, those whose troubles are the fruit of a troubled nation.
“I met my husband when his children were 3 and 7. I thought that I would learn to love someone else’s child and that it would just take time to bond. We are now married with a child of our own. Their biological mom is and has always been trouble and does nothing but try to put both my husband and me down in the kids eyes. The kids are sweet and loving but I still find it hard to bond to them. It’s always ‘my mommy this’ and ‘my mommy that’ and it makes it hard to bond. At times I want it to be me and my child and husband. I know how this sounds but seriously can you tell me I must immediately love and like everyone just because they happen to be smaller. I am not a bad or evil person I simply dislike having to be caring and attentive to another person’s child when I get none of the reward. They will always love their mother more and that’s the way it should be, but I can only take so much rejection. Eventually my heart turns off and I am left wondering why I thought being a step parent would be great.”
Blending families is one of the most difficult relational challenges humans face. Everyone in the family faces difficulties, even the children.
If you feel “unrewarded” you might want to reconsider some of your expectations. Any awards ceremony may only occur, if it ever does, when the children become adults and they reflect that you were a non-possessive, non-anxious, steady presence in their lives at time when their lives had been hit by several large blows all seemingly accosting them at the same time.
So, hold off on expecting much reward. It’s not that you won’t be rewarded; it’s that expecting it in itself suggests you might want to realign the understanding of your role.
Asking young children to love (embrace, accept) a stepmother without feeling disloyalty to their biological mother is asking children to do emotional acrobatics that most adults could not do.
If you want your “new” family to survive the continued presence of his “old” family, then I’d suggest you do not make too much of the distinction. “Us” and “them” doesn’t bode well for any human community let alone a blended family. Also, stay out of being the front line of discipline for “his” children: messing with invisible loyalties is a sure fire way to detonate the anger abiding already in the family system.
difficultrelationships.com 