Q: For the past three years, I have been married to a terrific lady. She is beautiful and a great mom for my children, but they do not always see it that way. Sometimes my children rebel and do not hang up their jackets in the hallway or come to supper when they are called.
When the kids react to my wife, I get caught in the middle. If I try to please the kids, my wife gets mad at me. If I try to please my wife, the kids get mad at me.
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I would like to get out of this conundrum but I don’t know how. Do you have any suggestions?
A: Sad as it may seem, we have no simple rules to help blended families go through the process of getting to know and respect each other.
In the United States, almost half of the 60 million children under the age of 13 live in blended families. Canadian figures are not known.
Most blended families go through the same tensions and anxieties you are finding.
The rule of thumb is that families take between five to seven years of working together before they blend into some kind of a reasonable family.
My guess is that you have done a great job nurturing your children. You just need a little help with rules and discipline around the house. That is where your wife, their stepmom, seems to be coming into play.
Children need both love and guidance. If they get love with no guidance, they lose out in the search for responsibility and productivity. If they get guidance without love, they are not learning how to be sensitive to others around them. They are at risk of not having friends and spending great parts of their lives in utter loneliness.
Your wife’s ability to add some guidance to the nurturing you are giving your children may be balancing the parenting your children need.
You do not have to be caught between your wife and your children.
I assume she is making rules that are reasonable for the average household. You need to support those rules as much as you can but that does not mean that you should join with her in a conspiracy against the kids.
Her rules are different for them. They need to adjust to that and they need your support and encouragement.
They need you to listen to them when they get angry, frustrated or discouraged and they need you to hear if they are struggling.
They need to be praised for the attempts they have made to follow the rules.
They need to know that you also struggle with some of the household rules. And they need to know that you believe in the new rules and that you are not about to change them.
Your wife needs your support too. She needs to know how much you appreciate the wonderful gift she has brought into your family.
The more positive you can be with all of them, the better the chances are that all of you will learn to live together successfully.
Jacklin Andrews is a family counsellor from Saskatchewan who has taught social work at two universities. Mail correspondence in care of Western Producer, Box 2500, Saskatoon, Sask., S7K 2C4 or e-mail jandrews@producer.com.
