I Love His Kids But...

How Do I Cope With My Blended Family?
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Advice from Beverly Hills StepFamily Therapist Susan Swanson, as shared with Nina Kotick

Those of us who have tried to navigate the choppy waters of developing a relationship with the children of someone we're dating (or marrying) have asked ourselves many if not all of the following questions:

--"Can I discipline a child who isn't mine?"

--"Why am I being treated like I am Satan?"

--"Who pays for her children's tuition?"

--"How much contact do we need to have with the exes?"

--"How do I regain any semblance of privacy?"

Susan Swanson faces these questions every day. A clinical therapist with a background in treating patients of trauma, Susan stumbled upon her specialty. Like many good things, her stepfamily institute, StepFamily Center, was born of a need--in this case, a personal one. When Susan first married at the age of 25, she walked into her new husband's full custody of two young children (aged 5 and 7). After going to five different therapists to help her with the unique and peculiar dynamics of the stepfamily, she felt worse. She then had a daughter with her new husband and the family dynamics grew even more problematic. Why couldn't her family be like TV's archetypal Brady Bunch? Of course, back in the 1970's, when the stepfamily was a relatively new phenomenon, that was the only blended family model she knew, and faced with the dearth of information available at the time, Susan became increasingly frustrated. It was trial and error, she explains--mostly error.

Frustrated that there were no services and little information available to her, Susan created a support group and began to specialize in helping families through the challenge of integrating lives. With divorce rates hovering for years in the US near 50%, blending is increasingly common and Susan's practice is thriving. With the divorce rate for second and third marriages with children involved nearing 75% (!), Susan aims to help families survive the unique challenges and also take advantage of the exceptional opportunities. In addition to private practice and a stepfamilycenter.com" target="_hplink">website, Susan leads an interactive workshop for remarried couples with children called 8 Tips to Thriving and Surviving StepFamily Life with Mary Kelly-Williams, founder of marriedwithbaggage.com. Susan shared a few tips with me:

Focus on the strength of the couple. Susan explained that people are looking for love and partnership, not necessarily to raise another's children. This is particularly true, she explained, when there has been a divorce (rather than the death of a parent) and the other parent is involved, often daily, in those children's lives. So Susan suggests that the couple find time first and foremost to be a couple. This will remind both partners why they are in the relationship when the challenges of stepfamilies arise.

Create a stepfamily model. Every nuclear family has an unstated model, with household rules, expectations, division of labor, boundaries. With the step-family, it's important to outline a model. Discussing each partner's comfort level with their roles can help to prevent problems before they arise and to navigate them if they do. Setting forth the division of labor for both the mundane and the unusual, and the expectations involving boundaries, discipline, respect and guidance aids all involved, including the children.

Empathize with the children's experience. Okay, so a couple's in love but the children could not care less. It's important to put aside those feelings and expectations of the new family and see the dynamics from the children's' perspective. Each child has a unique experience of what is happening to him or her. Take into account the children's ages, gender, sensibilities and consider what the new relationship offers them and how profoundly this new world will affect them. Remember that they are conscious of what their friends will think, how their parent who is not in the new partnership will feel and how this new relationship will affect their relationship with that parent. Their world has been turned upside down and is about to take another enormous turn - be sensitive to that.

Negotiate how to handle money. Susan believes that there shouldn't be any surprises, especially the second time around. Discuss who is bringing what to the table, how often and how much. Negotiate details from vacations to schooling and how to merge the two families' lifestyles. Sign prenuptial agreements to protect each other's children so as to avoid possible conflict later on but also to pacify older children now so that they can dismiss any ulterior motives. Prenups can always be altered later, depending on the length of the second relationship among other things. And importantly, they can often document what the parties are bringing to the marriage which will remain separate property to the benefit of the children if the parent so desires.

Understand the archetypes, particularly that of the evil step-mother. Susan explained that it is harder to walk into a step-family as the woman and knowing that can help ease the transition. I'm not sure why women first earned the stereotype of the wicked step-monster--perhaps as the traditional caretakers/givers of children, they were more involved in this stepfamily quagmire and thus more likely to trigger/encounter the stepfamily challenges. Regardless of how, the stereotype remains and if both partners are aware of this, then both can help to make it less personal.

In short, Susan explains that both partners of remarried couples need to be aware of the unique challenges of blending families. She works with both partners first to educate and then to empower them. Sometimes it just helps for couples to know that they are not alone in what they are facing, that experienced help can guide them through the maze of combining families.

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