Younger Children Tend to Make the Best Adjustment to Blended Families.
Making stepfamilies work
Parents of a composite family face plenty of challenges, but in that location are things you lot tin can do to make advice easier and help children accommodate to their new reality.
The then-called "blended family" is no longer an aberration in American society: It's a norm.
Planning for remarriage
A marriage that brings with it children from a previous marriage presents many challenges. Such families should consider three cardinal issues as they plan for remarriage:
- Financial and living arrangements. Adults should agree on where they will alive and how they volition share their money. Near often partners embarking on a 2d marriage report that moving into a new dwelling, rather than ane of the partner's prior residences, is advantageous because the new environs becomes "their dwelling house." Couples also should determine whether they want to keep their coin separate or share information technology. Couples who have used the "one-pot" method generally reported higher family unit satisfaction than those who kept their money separate.
- Resolving feelings and concerns about the previous matrimony. Remarriage may resurrect old, unresolved anger and hurts from the previous marriage, for adults and children. For example, hearing that her parent is getting remarried, a child is forced to give up hope that the custodial parents will reconcile. Or a woman may exacerbate a stormy relationship with her ex-husband, after learning of his plans to remarry, considering she feels hurt or aroused.
- Anticipating parenting changes and decisions. Couples should discuss the role the stepparent will play in raising their new spouse'south children, every bit well as changes in household rules that may accept to be fabricated. Even if the couple lived together before marriage, the children are likely to reply to the stepparent differently after remarriage because the stepparent has now assumed an official parental role.
Marriage quality
While newlywed couples without children usually use the start months of marriage to build on their human relationship, couples with children are oftentimes more than consumed with the demands of their kids.
Immature children, for example, may feel a sense of abandonment or competition as their parent devotes more time and energy to the new spouse. Adolescents are at a developmental stage where they are more than sensitive to expressions of affection and sexuality, and may exist disturbed past an active romance in their family.
Couples should make priority time for each other, by either making regular dates or taking trips without the children.
Parenting in stepfamilies
The most difficult aspect of stepfamily life is parenting. Forming a stepfamily with young children may be easier than forming one with adolescent children due to the differing developmental stages.
Adolescents, however, would rather split up from the family as they class their own identities.
Contempo research suggests that younger adolescents (age 10–fourteen) may have the most difficult time adjusting to a stepfamily. Older adolescents (historic period xv and older) need less parenting and may take less investment in stepfamily life, while younger children (nether age 10) are usually more accepting of a new developed in the family, especially when the developed is a positive influence. Immature adolescents, who are forming their own identities tend to be a bit more difficult to bargain with.
Stepparents should at first establish a relationship with the children that is more than akin to a friend or "camp advisor," rather than a disciplinarian. Couples tin can also agree that the custodial parent remain primarily responsible for control and subject of the children until the stepparent and children develop a solid bond.
Until stepparents tin can have on more parenting responsibilities, they can simply monitor the children'due south behavior and activities and go on their spouses informed.
Families might want to develop a list of household rules. These may include, for example, "We agree to respect each family member" or "Every family fellow member agrees to make clean up after him or herself."
Stepparent-kid relations
While new stepparents may want to jump right in and to establish a close relationship with stepchildren, they should consider the child's emotional condition and gender first.
Both boys and girls in stepfamilies have reported that they prefer verbal affection, such as praises or compliments, rather than physical closeness, such as hugs and kisses. Girls especially say they're uncomfortable with physical shows of affection from their stepfather. Overall, boys appear to have a stepfather more chop-chop than girls.
Nonresidential parent issues
After a divorce, children unremarkably conform meliorate to their new lives when the parent who has moved out visits consistently and has maintained a good relationship with them.
But once parents remarry, they ofttimes subtract or maintain depression levels of contact with their children. Fathers appear to be the worst perpetrators: On average, dads driblet their visits to their children past half within the first year of remarriage.
The less a parent visits, the more a child is likely to experience abandoned. Parents should reconnect by developing special activities that involve but the children and parent.
Parents shouldn't speak against their ex-spouses in front of the child because it undermines the child'southward self-esteem and may even put the child in a position of defending a parent.
Under the best conditions, it may accept two to four years for a new stepfamily to adjust to living together. And seeing a psychologist tin can assistance the process tin can go more than smoothly.
Thanks to James Bray, PhD, a researcher and clinician at the department of family medicine at Baylor Higher of Medicine.
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Source: https://www.apa.org/topics/families/stepfamily
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