These co-parenting tips will make your life easier. Honest.
Co-parenting often proves a nightmarish, combative process, with your children’s health and well-being as collateral damage.
Resentful and embittered divorced parents share inappropriate information with their children, or just outright lie to them about the other parent. Some do it for revenge. Some do it to maintain control over their children, whom they believe are “theirs†more than the other parent’s, and that the ends justify the means.
The real victims, however, are the children. They get deprived of emotional wellness and a chance for a healthy relationship with both parents. Even if sabotaging the parental relationship is successful, and the relationship between the children and the other parent is severed, the relationship with the alienating parent is far from healthy.
So here’s what to do, for your kids, instead of distancing your kids from your ex.
I recently received an email from a concerned stepmom expressing frustrations with her living situation and asking how to address them. The letter reflected challenges I've heard from many stepmoms over the years, in one form or another.
Her first concern was that she felt like an outsider, or like hired help, rather than feeling like part of a cohesive family unit. This is actually two separate problems, and here's the crux of it:
You need to feel like a wife, before you'll start feeling like a mother.
Your step-kids are getting it from all sides, but they’re going to be taking it all out in one place: on you.
They have to deal with their mother’s venom, their father shirking responsibility, and discomfort caused by accommodating you as you enter their lives. In their eyes, you are new, you are strange, you are temporary, and you are disposable.
That can change with time. With some patience, empathy, and clear, consistent boundaries, your step-kids will grow to trust, connect with, and maybe even like you.
Ever feel like you and your husband are running two households in one home? Can you even remember why you married him? Where’d the romance go? Parenting your children consumes your day; parenting his kids consumes his. They’ve become the marriage’s focus, moving your relationship as a couple onto the back burner.
