Today is National Foster Care Day, the first Tuesday in National Foster Care Month. It also is always a week or two before Mother’s Day. This year, because of the way the days landed on the calendar, the two events are only a few…
When raising other people’s children, it’s easy to start hating Mothers’ Day and Fathers’ Day. It’s a bit like being single on Valentine’s Day. All of the attention goes to biological parents, and foster parents or stepparents are left on their own…
It’s time to start planning ahead for Mothers’ Day (May 9) and Fathers’ Day (June 20). Those days are always difficult ones for those of us raising other people’s children. Even if we want to ignore both days as mere “greeting card”…
In continued honor of National Siblings Day, I want to talk for a bit about one of the biggest losses that our foster children face, which is losing track of their siblings. It is hard to find statistics, but I have seen estimates that anywhere from one-half to two-thirds of…
I am late recognizing that Saturday, April 10, was National Siblings Day. It reminded me that one of the most difficult parts of blending families is helping our kids get along with each other. I didn’t have biological children when I married…
“My mom doesn’t make me do that!” We’ve all heard it. Our child’s biological parent has different rules, and our child likes those rules better than ours. It is very easy to get into a battle of wills or to criticize their parents’ rules. Those…
Being a foster parent or stepparent can be a complicated task and there are few simple and easy solutions to the challenges we face. Several years ago, however, I stumbled across a simple technique that transformed my approach…
I ran across an outstanding article that describes how children can form actual, real memories of things that they never witnessed. In this article, the memories were benign and positive (activities with a deceased grandfather), but the…
It’s Tolkien Reading Day, set for today because in The Lord of the Rings, the heroes managed to overthrow the villain on March 25. In allowing his characters to triumph, however, Tolkien underscores another continuing theme in his books…
This week we celebrate Tolkien Reading Day. I have been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien’s work since I discovered it in college. I started The Lord of the Rings, like many projects, because the guy I was infatuated with at the time liked the book…
In this series, I’ve talked about how our commitments to our children have to be strong and one-way. It is easy to conflate that truth into believing that we must unconditionally commit to our children. In reality, no emotionally healthy…
In this series, we’ve talked about the importance of making strong commitments to our children, and that we have to be willing to make one-way commitments. However, one-way does not mean unlimited. Each of us has different skill sets…