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…
I was really irritated. It had been a long day, my foster daughter had pitched a fit because I wouldn’t take her shopping, and now my dog was missing. I knew the dog was inside the house, just as I knew that I had been right in the…
One night shortly after my marriage, I went to tell my new stepson good night. During the conversation, he asked, “Debbie, when you and Dad split up…”. I interrupted him to say that we wouldn’t be spitting up. “OK,” he resumed…
I recently found an article about an intriguing study at Emory University finding that children who knew more about their family history show higher levels of well-being. I cannot locate the original 2010 study, and while I have found related…
This post is the last (for now) in a series about how we can be the mentor in our blended families’ stories rather than the evil stepparent. If we can start displaying some of these characteristics, we will have a better shot at developing a…