The theme here is the same as building effective inner-family supports. You co-parent
teammates intentionally build relationships with receptive, non-related people who
are knowledgeable about, and motivated to build, a healthy stepfamily.
There are two
groups of potential supporters outside your stepfamily: lay people and
human-service
professionals.
Finding Other Co-parents to Talk With
Roughly one of every six American families is living "in
step,"
and many more are in the wings - millions of single bioparents preparing to date.
There
are a lot of other co-parents and stepkids in your community needing informed,
empathic supports just like you do. Where can you find them?
Your
workplace,
neighborhood, and
church.
In casual conversations, choose to use stepfamily titles and terms about your own
situation ("Having a stepdaughter is pretty confusing.") Let others know
you’re looking to meet other co-parents. When others seem receptive, ask assertively, if the chemistry feels right, if they’d be willing to talk regularly with you
about stepfamily experiences and successes.
Don’t be put off by the structure of
their stepfamily looking very different than yours. The common challenges - like
resolving
values, and loyalty conflicts, and clarifying alien
stepfamily
-
are universal.
Some communities have
classes and/or
support groups for stepfamily co-parents, sponsored by a church, school,
mental-health organization, or hospital. Such groups often focus on
"stepparents" – specially stepmothers - not co-parents.
If you
do find a class or group, expect them to have only fragmentary understanding of all that
you’re reading here.
Group members may or may not be OK with using these
as a framework for proactive stepfamily-building. Few
or no participants will know about the toxic [wounds + unawareness]
the five re/divorce
hazards
,
or and personal
from false-self
(Project 1).
If
you can’t find a local co-parent support group (which is likely), consider
starting your own. It’s a lot of work – and the
rewards, like new friendships, new helpful ideas, banished isolation, and real community
service, are enormous!
Another way to meet other co-parents is via…
Your kids’
schools.
Probably
15%-20% of the kids in your middle and high schools are in multi-home
stepfamilies.
If your local PTO or PTA and/or school district has a newsletter, advertise in it
for other stepfamily co-parents. I’ve met a number of stepmoms who did this or
advertised in their local paper, and wound up creating a bi- weekly Saturday-morning
breakfast meeting with other stepmoms. In a few cases, their husbands started to get
interested.
Thanks to the dedication of two social workers and cooperative teachers and parents, one
Chicago-area high school organized a weekly
peer-support group
for kids of divorce and parental re/marriage. It was well attended,
as was a similar group for kids with a chemically- addicted parent. My
strong bias is that every private and public school Board and district
administration should support such groups, for there is widespread need!
Internet on-line "chat" (discussion)
groups. Co-parents’ great need to vent to interested others, and having no local support
group to do that, is demonstrated by many "chat groups" on all the major
Internet online services. As more people go online, there is an increasing number of
Websites devoted to stepfamily life.
Many sites focusing on
parenting and
family
life have online discussion groups for co-parents. These sites change often, so
periodically use one or more Web search "engines" (computer programs) like
Yahoo, Excite,
InfoSeek, and
Alta
Vista, using keywords like "stepfamily" or "stepparent."
Still more places to meet stepfamily co-parents are…
Rainbows
grief-support
groups for kids and adults, "Tough Love," and chapters
of similar national mutual-help groups. Many adults in groups like these are in
stepfamilies, though they may not identify as such. Many of the adults in local and
national single-parent groups like "Parents Without Partners" (PWP),
"Mothers Without Custody" (MWoC), and "UnmarriedAmerica.com" prospective or re/married stepfamily co-parents.
Stepfamily
and seminars. Watch your mail and local paper for
ads about educational offerings for co-parents. If you find any and attend, consider
asking participants if they’d like to meet regularly after the class to vent, and
share ideas and encouragements. An option is to ask your local mental-health organizations
or hospital family-care department if they’d sponsor such a seminar or series.
Why should you partners invest effort in seeking other co-parents?
Because
they’re the only people on Earth who can listen with experience-based
empathy
to your stepfamily impasses, dilemmas, frustrations, and confusions. Non-steppeople may
sympathize
from a biofamily perspective – but they can’t credibly validate your perceptions
and feelings like others who have lived versions of what you’re living.
You only have
limited daily or weekly time to commune with others. Your highest payback for investing
time in stepfamily-focused discussions comes from talking to others working on their
versions of the same projects. Ideally, you’ll find people farther down the
stepfamily path than you are (e.g. re/married five or more years), who have
developed a valuable sense of perspective and cause-and-effect.
As you listen to other co-parents, develop a sense of who’s more successful, and who
is less so. (You first need a clear framework for judging
success.)
Both have value! Ask the former something like "Why, specifically, do you think your
stepfamily (or re/marriage, or co-parental relationship) is working well?" Listening respectfully to less successful, struggling co-parents can suggest what
not
to do.
There’s also great value in listening attentively to
re/divorced
stepfamily co-parents, if they’ve stabilized in grieving their losses and
life changes. Unless they’re reality-distorted,
unrecovering Grown Wounded
Children (which is likely), they should be able to give you fairly clear feedback on
why their stepfamily (i.e. their re/marriage) broke up, and how to avoid the
pitfalls.
They can also widen your awareness of what a second divorce feels like, usually in
middle age.
The more such stories you can collect, the deeper your appreciation of the
collective value of these
will be, and the higher
your motivation to invest effort in them. Again – don’t expect the structure of
other co-parents’ stepfamilies to match yours. Their core motivations
(adults and kids filling daily
and their
merger-adjustment tasks are
identical to yours.
As you form a network of stepfamily-wise co-parents, you partners can also enlarge your
support network by…
Finding Qualified
Professional Supporters
If you’re already re/married, I suspect you’d agree that typical
co-parent-family mergers and daily stepfamily life are more confusing and conflictual than
biofamily life. Co-parents’ periodic need for qualified professional help is
usually higher than for partners in first-marriage families.
"Qualified"
means that in addition to their other education, a clinician, lawyer, clergyperson,
doctor, or teacher has meaningful training in stepfamily norms and
dynamics. Currently,
that's rare. If you seek help from an untrained counselor, s/he’ll
probably use biofamily norms and standards. That means her or his well-meant guidance
will be ineffective or actually increase your situational confusion
and stress.
See
these suggestions on how to choose a qualified
stepfamily counselor. You can use the same suggestions and criteria for working
with clergy, your kids’ teachers and counselors, and legal and
financial
professionals. Also see these suggestions for
avoiding bad advice, and choosing useful remarriage and
co-parenting
self-help books.
If you and your partner attend church or Temple, take the initiative to ask your
clergyperson/s whether they’re interested in learning more
about stepfamily realities and needs. Chances are, they’ve never studied them. A
quick attention grabber is to show them a copy of your three-generational extended-stepfamily map. If they show interest, see if they can access these
Web pages or will read the related Break the Cycle!
guidebooks.
Learn if they’re aware of how many families in the congregation are in stepfamilies,
and what the special needs of their adults and kids are. See if they and/or
the church Board would be willing to evaluate program options for helping
divorced and stepfamily co-parents and kids. Some options include...
-
Post-divorce and informed
pre-re/marital
counseling (ref.
and...
-
Grief-education classes, and
grief-support groups like "Rainbows";
-
Communication skill-building
classes and materials (see
-
Co-parent
support groups;
-
A
group for
and …
-
An adult-supervised peer-support group for
kids of divorced and/or re/married parents (see
Conservative clergy or church boards who view divorce as a mortal sin and
don’t support it or re/marriage would be understandably ambivalent about or
uninterested in programs like these. Before the Hereafter arrives, divorced and stepfamily
kids and adults, including ex mates and relatives, need informed help!
Divorced orthodox co-parents probably have special needs for genuine
atonement and forgiveness. The alternatives are ongoing toxic
and
If they’re an unrecovering Grown Wounded Child, they already have
too much of these
burdens!
Another way to build your external support network is to encourage your
kids’ school staffs to have a yearly or bi-annual full-day training on the
special adjustment needs of typical stepkids,
including healing the
from early
deprivation.
Most
U.S. public schools need this, because roughly 40%
of their students are in divorced or stepfamily homes. Ideally, multi-school
districts will sponsor such a one-day in-service for the staffs of all their schools.
At
the very least, if you have a "special needs" or floundering child, show
their teachers and counselors your
and copies of these pages or
articles. Focus specially on the part of Project 10 describing the
four sets of kids’ adjustment
needs. Few educators have ever had
any training on stepfamily basics, so like most co-parents, they "don’t know
what they don’t know."
Average co-parents like you periodically use a
family-law
lawyer or
professional
mediator for help in resolving disputes over divorce
settlements, child
custody, financial support,
visitation, or parenting-agreements.
Typical re/marriers are older than first-timers, and (some) have accumulated some
wealth.
Those who have been financially traumatized by prior divorce may want a legal
pre-nuptial agreement for old-age and inheritance protections. You’ll also
need periodic legal assistance in drafting or updating wills and estate plans, tailored to
your complex new stepfamily relationships.
Perhaps a stepparent in your family will want to
adopt a stepchild. In my
27 years’ clinical experience,
I’ve met or heard of virtually
no
legal professionals, including family court judges – with basic training in the
stepfamily realities and Projects you’re reading about here. This is a mute
statement about benign U.S. priorities and social ignorance, and law-school curricula
designers.
Generally,
state laws don’t accord non-adoptive stepparents the same minor-child parental rights
or responsibilities as bioparents. Choose an attorney familiar with the
family-law portion of your state’s legal code, and ask
him or her to research
and summarize your state’s set of legal rights and liabilities of
stepparents, for you co-parents.
For instance, if your teen stepchild commits a felony, who is legally
responsible? If a stepparent dies without a will, to whom do their net assets flow? Most
co-parents – specially during courtship - don’t mull questions like these until
a
explodes.
|
The moral: when you need family legal
assistance, shop for professional competence and reliability, and stepfamily
awareness. If you can only find the former, be assertive in requesting that
your attorney scan some version of these pages or equivalent.
They probably have many divorcing and re/married clients, so it’s in
everyone’s best interest for them to become stepfamily-aware. |
Incidentally, I believe that courts who order warring co-parents to use a professional
mediator who lacks meaningful stepfamily training often waste the co-parents’ time,
money, and emotional reserves. Short-term settlements may collapse, as your complex
stepfamily
evolves over the years.
Without stepfamily training, your
health-insurance professionals
are likely to under-appreciate your
and
and the complexity of your web of family
relationships. They may unwittingly propose or write policies with coverage loopholes
based on biofamily norms and assumptions.
Make sure such advisors know you’re
forming or already in a multi-home stepfamily. One way to bring this home is to review the
genogram you drew in
with them. Expect surprise and awe, and then (hopefully) questions about your other
co-parents’ insurance coverages.
Finally, it may be helpful for your medical-care providers to know
you’re in a stepfamily, and to understand the many potential sources of
emotional stress. At the least, a stepfamily-aware doctor, pharmacist, dietician, or nurse
can offer you comforting reassurance and empathy - some are re/married themselves.
In the best case, they may be able to identify a stepfamily-relationship dynamic that may
be contributing to a physical condition (e.g. sleep, digestion, or elimination problems).
I am not medically trained, and after 40 adult years of study I now absolutely believe in the reality of
emotionally-caused or amplified illnesses and disabilities.
Research suggests that unhealed
stress our immune systems, organic functions, and hormonal and neuro-chemical
balances. Researchers have recently confirmed that
early-childhood
trauma
significantly affects the brain growth of typical young children. A medical
professional who appreciates the emotional
inherent in daily stepfamily life
may give better advice and prescriptions than someone unaware of these.
As
you see, there are many options for strengthening your co-parenting support
network outside your stepfamily. Putting shared effort into expanding your
"outside" lay and professional supports is a high-return long-term investment in
your re/marital and stepfamily health and security. It’s easy to put this off
until a crisis explodes. Look at such support-building as investing in a kind of "re/marriage
insurance."
The Web address of this
4-page article is
http://sfhelp.org/11/support.htm
Four Rich Sources of Stepfamily
Support 