Four Strengths of Effective Stepfamilies
Become Adroit
Adapters
Four Strengths of Effective Stepfamilies
by Dawn Miller, dmiller@thestepfamilylife.com
Do you ever feel like your life is a fairy tale run amok? Like the plot
line was hijacked and the princess was left standing in the mud while
the ringbearer hogged the silver screen spotlight? Then you know what
life can feel like in a stepfamily.
Life is never a fairy tale. It's true that I love my husband and he
loves me and we got married. But trying the knot meant that we had to
change – both of us.
Change stinks. Let's face it. We all hate change. That's why there's a
mini-market chock full of self-help theorists specializing in personal
and organizational change. Whether we are young or old, we all hate to
change.
Yet stepfamilies are embroiled in a seething cesspool of change as they
sort out family relationships, roles and expectations. Research shows
that it takes at least four years for a stepfamily to gel into a
functional unit. If you don't learn to adapt early on in the picture –
you won't make it to even the intermission. Sixty per cent of all
remarriages will end in divorce.
Effective stepfamilies learn how to handle change effectively and are
adroit adapters. So how can we be effective and deal with change in a
healthy way?
First of all, we can't push change too quickly and we have to be
realistic. A study by the Stepfamily Association of America found that
adults and children hold divergent ideas about what role a stepparent
should take on in a stepfamily. Children felt a stepparent should be
more like a "friend" and less like a "parent."
The study results suggest that parents, stepparents and children need to
talk together about what role the stepparent will have in a new
household. There is considerable confusion about what the role of a
stepparent should be in our society – leaving it to the actors in this
fairy tale run amok to straighten out the story line unaided by a fairy
godmother.
We have to choose our battles wisely and learn how to adapt, or we'll
never get out of the mud. In setting up our household, my husband and I
were more worried about stacking the deck with pluses so our stepfamily
would get off on the right foot, than about having a pristinely
organized house. There was some give and take.
Take for example, the great TV battle. I wanted no TVs in the kids'
rooms. My background in youth development said that falling asleep to a
TV was bad for kids. So of course, I protested when my husband wanted to
put TVs in the kids' rooms. My husband looked at me, wearing my halo of
self-righteous youth worker, and said honey, we can win the TV battle,
but we will lose the war.
{mospagebreak}
And he had a point. Because the kids were acclimated to sleeping with
TVs at their mom's house and his old apartment – they couldn't sleep
without that fuzzy background noise. We had so many other issues to deal
with the kids on in setting up our house – not leaving food in their
rooms, learning to respect our space, sitting at a table to eat dinner
as a "family" every night they were with us – he feared that adding no
TVs to the package would upset the applecart for good.
Realizing that we had to pick our battles was tough. Because after all –
I didn't want to change – I wanted it my way. With great reluctance, I
agreed to give up my protest on TVs in the kids rooms. We invested our
disciplinary energy (or rather my husband's disciplinary energy) into
enforcing things that were more vital to family functioning than a TV
set blaring at 2am on low volume.
And the kids learned to adapt to the rules in our house that were
different from the rules at their mom's house. They learned how to set
the table, pray before meals, and that eating dinner together as a
family with us could be boring at worst and might even be a little
enjoyable. We are becoming adroit adapters although we are still in the
learning phase.
Is the fairy tale plot line really straightened out from its cataclysmic
coach crash? Nope. Fortunately for us, the movie hasn't ended yet.
A thirty-something wife and stepmom to three teens, Dawn Miller lives in
the Washington, DC area. She writes a weekly column on life in blended
families at
www.thestepfamilylife.com.
Website links about stepfamilies, a free newsletter and a bookstore are
available on the site.
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