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| Successful Stepfamilies
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Quick
Divorce.us
Dr. Peter Marshall -- a child psychologist
practicing and the author of Cinderella Revisited: How to Survive your
Stepfamily without a Fairy Godmother (Whitecap Books) -- points out that
the relationship with potential stepchildren will be a vital factor in
whether your marriage will last. "If you don't want to get involved in
parenting, or your partner doesn't, it won't work," he says. "If you want
to live with a person, you need to think about whether you want to take
responsibility for his or her children. It's very stressful: life gets
extremely complicated, and it's not just temporary. Some people are just
not ready for it."
Jeannette Lofas, Ph.D., CSW, the president and founder of The Stepfamily
Foundation, stresses the necessity of careful consideration. "Keep in
mind that two out of three remarriages fail," she says. "Would you take
the children on a plane to San Francisco if there was only a 1/3 chance
that the plane would work? Prepare very carefully. Marriage takes a lot
of work to survive nowadays; stepfamilies take even more." Dr. Lofas suggests
premarital counseling to make sure you and your partner really know what
you're getting into; a counselor will help you to work out a family plan,
or at least to start creating a plan. "Learn how a stepfamily functions,"
she advises. "The couple has to work out a system for agreement; otherwise
there'll be a lot of conflict. Make sure that you agree on the plan, and
that the agreement is clear to everybody."
Lillian Messinger, the author of Remarriage: A Family Affair (Plenum Press)
and a pioneer in family counseling in Toronto, has seen problems arise
with couples who hadn't taken the children from their previous relationships
into consideration before they married. "Too frequently, a remarrying
couple hasn't stopped to consider that it's not a honeymoon period --
it's a new type of family," she explains. She suggests that having children
and stepparents get to know each other early on, on a gradual basis, will
help ease tensions. "The new relationship has to involve the children
as it develops -- they should be part of the courtship, and if the kids
have any problems, they shouldn't keep them secret. An advance relationship
before the marriage is extremely important."
Dr. Engel adds that doing homework on your own might be necessary. "You
should look at your own knowledge base for relationships with children,"
she advises. "Read a good child-development book in order to understand
how children develop. Talk to other people in stepfamilies as well." Learning
about stepfamilies second-hand is no substitute for experience, but it
will help you find your way. "Parenting is a hard job. There's lots of
chaos and you're bound to become the 'bad guy' sometimes."
Above all, don't expect it to be easy, or that you and your partner's
children will love each other immediately. (Sometimes, in fact, love never
arises between stepparents and children -- but mutual respect and liking
will take you a long way.) The more prepared you and your partner are,
the better you'll be at withstanding the bumps along the way.
An instant family
The most frequent mistake that people make when marrying into stepfamilies
is believing that they're like "normal" or nuclear families. Although
stepfamilies have become much more common and accepted in recent years,
people still fall into the trap of expecting them to run on automatic.
"Most people think that love will instantly appear," notes Dr. Lofas.
"They think that a stepfamily will function like a biological family,
and they say, 'I'm going to be the new father/mother.' But the kids don't
want somebody new; they already have a mother or father. So stepparents
need to know what their new roles entail. It's important to know the dynamics
absolutely: the parent always feels conflicted in love between the new
spouse and the children, and you have to work out how to manage that."
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