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Strategies for Strength

1. FIND YOUR SIGNIFICANCE & BUILD YOUR SELF-ESTEEM

When I’ve had a particularly tough time at home, work becomes the counterbalance that keeps me feeling okay about myself. At work, I’m just me – judged by my colleagues on my performance and relationships. At work, I feel professional, capable and respected. My colleagues carry no pre-conceived feelings about me and they’re certainly not about to launch into a tirade about the shortcomings of my personality and value system.

There’s a place for all of us that makes us feel worthy and good. Whether it’s through involvement in the community, schools, sports, academic achievement, friend groups – whatever. Find that role that makes you feel like your best-self and make it a priority. That’s the real you, and finding a sanctuary for the real you to flourish is really important.

2. PUT YOUR RELATIONSHIP FIRST

Putting your relationship first might be a controversial strategy, given that Western culture says we must always put our children first. And of course we must put children’s welfare and wellbeing first, but that doesn’t necessarily mean ‘always support their view’ and ‘give them everything they ask for’.

If the big-picture is that you want a life-long relationship with your partner, but the current stepfamily dynamic is pushing everyone to the limit, then sometimes it’s best for the release to come from short-term space with the children. My view is that the relationship between biological parents and their children is more robust in the long-term than a divorced parent might think. So a bit of push-back and boundary setting, particularly if it signals support to the stepmother, is a good thing for the long term stability of the relationship.

The benefits to the kids of dad having one long-term partner shouldn’t be underestimated either. Surely dad being in a stable relationship with one stepmother is better for the children than a string of girlfriends and their children?

3. ACKNOWLEDGE AND MANAGE YOUR STRESS

4. GET HELP FROM EXPERTS

5. PLAY BY YOUR OWN RULES

Having an expectation that the stepfamily should operate in the same way as a nuclear family is a source of stress for stepmothers. When it becomes apparent that you won’t all live happily ever after, you might feel like a failure – or others might make you feel like a failure.

For the first five years of my relationship, my partner and I kept separate houses so that when he had his four children (every second week) he could be a sole parent, and alternate weeks he moved back into my place with me and my children. We even had a cat that happily moved between our two houses. Why did we continue to live separately when adults in a serious relationship usually live together? We did it because we knew that forcing together our two families would not have worked for anyone. We were too different and there were a variety of unsupportive external factors. Our relationship would not have survived, and our kids wouldn’t have benefited either. We were happy with our unconventional living arrangement but I recall a friend telling me she thought it was just plain weird that we didn’t co-habit. We called it problem solving.

There have been many times over the years that we have decided to do whatever it has taken to get through a difficult situation or period, even if it wasn’t a picture of happy families. But it’s about the long game, so if both you and your partner can be flexible problem solvers, then you’ve probably got a much better chance of winning.

6.) LEARN WAYS TO DEAL WITH CONFLICT (SO YOU DON’T GO CRAZY)

7.) TAKE FINANCES OUT OF THE EQUATION

Money is a major area of conflict in stepfamilies Research suggests that only 20 percent of remarried couples discuss their finances before re-partnering. Yet questions about financial support and or contribution toward “my” children, “your” children, and perhaps “our” children, coupled with financial obligations to ex-spouses, make stepfamily finances complex. Added into the mix is that academics say money is a ‘metaphor for couple and family dynamics boundaries, differentiation from family of origin, trust, commitment, and power’(Stanley & Einhorn, 2007). Complex doesn’t even start to describe it! So that’s the problem – what’s the answer? There’s no silver bullet here.

  • Maintain separate finances until your children are financially self-sufficient (but that only works if you have relatively equal incomes)
  • Go to a financial advisor who can help you talk about money issues and work through ways to manage your finances so that you both have control and transparency.
  • Good old-fashioned talking about how you will handle money. This article includes a set of questions for you to discuss and agree solutions to. http://extension.missouri.edu/p/GH6603