As I discussed in my last post, commitment is the cornerstone of parenting in foster and blended families. However, healthy commitments can never be unlimited. We should love our kids unconditionally, but healthy commitments are never unconditional. We must establish healthy boundaries in order to protect and grow our relationships with our children…
When stepping into the role of a foster parent or stepparent, you may hear that all you need to do is love your kids. Love is wonderful and essential, but it is not enough. Love alone won’t sustain your challenging relationships with children who have suffered trauma. Commitment — unwavering, realistic, and bone-deep commitment — is the only foundation for building a healthy relationship…
An important principle in setting priorities for your foster or blended family is understanding how to balance everyone’s unique needs. Younger children, for example, need more of our time than older children. Children who have suffered trauma have more complex needs than children who haven’t gone through those experiences. In addition to the usual work commitments, school requirements, and extracurricular activities, we have to find time and energy to encourage emotional healing and building trust. To meet all of those demands, we need to remember some important principles…
This week of Valentine’s Day is a good time to remember raising other people’s children requires us to prioritize our marriage after self-stewardship but ahead of our children. As parents, we know that we need to put our children’s needs ahead of our own. We should not put them ahead of our marriages…
When talking about how to set priorities, I always start with core values and self-care (actually self-stewardship) as the foundation. The reason I put those two at the bottom of the pyramid is that we can’t adequately care for our families unless we first put in place the resources that we will need to draw from…
One vexing part of parenting is watching our kids make decisions that we know will turn out badly for them. Children who have suffered trauma seem to be particularly prone to making problematic decisions. How do we respond when our children insist on making life decisions that we simply cannot support? Below are some thoughts about how to keep lines of communication open with our children when we can’t agree with their decisions.
Once we’ve thought through what treating our kids the same means, we have to know how to communicate to them that we care about them equally. It’s particularly difficult when we are trying to blend step-siblings or transition a foster child into our home. The non-biological children are extremely sensitive to favoritism, and often see it when we don’t think it exists. They also tend to interpret any different treatment as unfairly letting someone else get away with breaking the rules. So we need to figure out how to communicate to our kids that they are a part of the family just as every other child in our home. As with most parenting challenges, there are few hard and fast rules, but there are some important principles that can guide us…
One mantra we hear as foster and stepparents is to treat all of our kids the same. It’s also much easier said than done. Stepchildren and foster children often will accuse us of treating our biological children as our “favorite.” It’s not a complaint we can counter with words. We have to live it out and let our kids see that we love them equally. But first, we have to look at ourselves and understand how to think about the problem…
One recommendation that stepparents hear frequently is “don’t overstep your bounds,” or “stay in your lane.” It’s an important principle to remember, but it can be frustrating because it’s rarely clear where your lane is. Furthermore, as your relationship with your family deepens, and especially as your children get older, that lane changes. So how do we as Plan B parents figure out where our lane is at any given time? This week, let’s discuss some principles for figuring out where we fit into our unusual and challenging families…
Being a stepparent or foster parent is a challenging task for many reasons, but the highest hurdle may be knowing how and when to provide strong structure for our children. There is no doubt that structure and predictability are important foundations for families. However, there are many reasons we need to make nurture a higher priority for our relationships than enforcing structure…
Like most foster, step-, or adoptive parents, one of my biggest challenges has been knowing how to respond to my children’s bone-deep sense that I was not supposed to be in their lives. Children are hard-wired to want a biological parent, and only biological parents, as the foundation of their families. There’s…
One of the most important things we can give our kids is unconditional love. They need to know that, whatever mistakes they make, we still love and care about them. At the same time, we have to establish clear boundaries for them. Knowing how to offer unconditional acceptance while enforcing boundaries for…