As we head to the end of the school year, many of us start thinking about a family vacation. Our family loves to travel, and we have always taken a collection of younger relatives and friends along with us. Here are some techniques that we have learned over the…
This time of year is always busy, with the end of school and trying to plan for the summer. This year we have the added stress of navigating the ever-changing and contradictory advice about recovering from the pandemic lockdown…
Teenagers generally are the toughest audience for a stepparent or foster parent. Younger children are at a developmental stage where they are more likely to want a relationship with you and will accept you more readily.
One common problem with Mother’s Day and Father’s Day that I don’t see discussed often is what to in complex stepfamilies where different sets of siblings have different biological parents. The usual result is that one set of…
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…