Ruminating

For the first couple of years that I was a stepmom I used to really get carried away ruminating—that is, dwelling on my worries over and over again.

I was frustrated that neither of my stepdaughter’s parents seemed worried that she wasn’t meeting her developmental milestones. That her speech and cognition were delayed. That she seemed unreasonably terrified of the world. That she seemed to always be eating junk food. That she would never stop throwing tantrums. That she'd never graduate from diapers and she’d end up calling me from a high school bathroom stall asking me to come wipe her bottom.

I’m guessing that there are a lot of stepmothers who struggle with ruminating. After all, there’s just so much new territory to cover as a stepmom, and so much of it is out of our control.

Not only is dwelling on problems frustrating, but excessive ruminating has been shown to lead to depression. So when you find yourself dwelling on something that your stepchild or their parents have done (or not done, or keep doing…), I’ve found that it’s best to try your best to nip your worries in the bud before they have a chance to take over.

This MSN article has some good tips:

1) Put on music and dance, scrub the bathtub spotless, whatever engrosses you—for at least 10 minutes.
2) Tell yourself you can obsess all you want from 6 p.m. to 7 p.m., but until then, you're banned.
3) For one minute, eyes closed, acknowledge all the thoughts going through your mind.
4) Consider "What's the worst that could happen?" and "How would I cope?"
5) Ask a friend or relative to be your point person when your thoughts start to speed out of control.
6) Accept that you're human and make mistakes—and then move on.

Do you have any suggestions to share?

Stepmothers: Taking Control

Feeling out of control is one of the most significant challenges that stepmothers face.

When you’re single, you’re in control of your own life. If you start a family with a man, then at least you start off on equal footing with him; you share authority and decision-making power. But partner yourself with man who has children from a previous relationship, and society and step-parenting books tell you to give up control of certain things to your husband and, ultimately, to your stepchildren.

Significantly, most conventional advice says that your partner should be the only one in your household to set rules for his children and to discipline them. This leads to a great many problems. Chiefly, by giving up authority to discipline the children in your household, you are abdicating control over how they will respect you and your home. This means you become totally dependent on your husband to direct his children to treat you and your home with respect.

Secondly, if your partner is like many men, he won’t automatically discipline his kids to the extent that they require, if at all. Whether he feels guilty about divorcing their mother or he’s just clueless—it doesn’t matter. All kids will push to see what they can get away with, and if neither you nor their father enforce limits and discipline then they'll end up getting away with murder.

Not only have I heard countless stories of this happening, but I've lived the consequences firsthand. When my stepdaughter started coming over about every other day, her father would leave her with me to watch while he spent the evening at his computer. She spent the next year and a half ordering me around, jumping on the furniture, screaming, breaking things, throwing tantrums, and generally carrying on. I have a very vivid memory of her punching me in the face with her sippy-cup and screaming “MORE JUICE!” It was exhausting. I spent most of my time caught between wondering why my fiancé never corrected her behavior and trying unsuccessfully to nag him to do so. (He finally told me that he wanted her time at our home to be happy, and as such he didn’t want to be telling her what to do and not do all the time.)

But what if your partner does discipline his kids? Problem solved, right?

Not quite. While this might improve your stepchildren’s behavior, you’ll be left feeling like you’re playing second-fiddle to him if he’s the only one in the family with real authority. Worse yet, if you lack control in your own right then you’ll end up making reports to him all the time about their behavior. If they disrespect you or your home then you’re left tattling on them to your partner--making you feel more like one of the kids than the grown-ups.

Furthermore, this situation equates to your partner making decisions that affect your life that you have no say in. What if he decides on spanking his kids but you get upset watching it happen? What if he decided to overlook an annoying habit that drives you absolutely insane?

Even in cases where he does solicit your opinion, the message sent by conventional step-parenting advice is that any decision ultimately comes down to what the father decides—and that you’re expected to go along with his decision.

Ultimately, whether your partner disciplines your stepchildren or not, you’re left feeling helpless and out of control if you do not have equal authority in the household.

The solution? You need to feel appropriately in control of your life and your family, and you need to see yourself as an equal partner with the children’s father. This means you need to have the authority to be a parent in your own home: to require respectful behavior from your stepchildren, to participate in setting expectations and rules for them, and the ability to follow through with consequences and discipline.

I know this is much easier said that done--especially because it goes against society's conventional view of what a stepmother should act like. I plan to discuss my own experiences tackling this in future posts, and I hope to hear how other stepmothers have approached it as well.

Gaining Affection from your Stepchildren, Part II

This week I’m sharing advice on some simple things you can do to start gaining affection from your stepchildren. These are little things to start out with, the kind you can begin with and then build on as time passes.

Touch
Touch your stepkids frequently. Studies have shown that touch has the power to positively alter moods and even biochemical reactions in the body. Start off small; for example, gently tap your hand on your stepchild when you have something to tell them. (“Oh yeah, I found that thing you were looking for…")

Gretchen Rubin calls this “subliminal touching.” Rubin explains that, “studies show that subliminal touching – that is, touching a person so unobtrusively that it’s not noticed – dramatically increases that person’s sense of well-being and positive feelings toward the toucher. And vice versa. This fleeting touching might be something like touching a person’s back as you walk through a door.”

As time passes you can move up to hugging. Hugs have been shown to lower blood pressure and cause our bodies to release oxytocin, a chemical that promotes bonding.

Keep Your Mouth Shut
When you’re first starting out together, listen when your stepchildren talk without adding your two cents. If necessary, add a few little comments here and there to keep them talking, like “mm-hm,” “oh really?” and “what was that like?” You want to earn their trust at first by letting them know they can speak to you freely. Your stepchildren are going to looking for reasons to dislike you, and they are likely to interpret things you say as trying to correct them or change them even if that isn’t your intent. Later, once you’ve gotten used to each other, you should feel comfortable expressing your opinions things they say—but that’s a whole separate post.

Talk
Share information about yourself to gain their trust. Even though they may not be willing to say so, they want to know what you’re all about. The trick to doing this effectively is to frequently volunteer tidbits of information that require no response on their part. They don’t want to feel like they’re in an official “get to know you” session all the time, and they’ll get overwhelmed if you come on too strong. You’re sure to have already talked about your job and your hobbies—now is the time to start mentioning things like your friendships, your favorite foods, and that time your little brother put bubble gum in your hair in the third grade.

Stepmothers: the Road to Love is Paved with Low Expectations

I think one of the best things you can do as a stepmother is to lower your expectations for your stepchildren and their mother. It ends up being easier on you if you don’t expect more from them than they are capable of.

Your Stepchildren

I recently read The Explosive Child* by Ross W. Greene. Greene’s belief is that “children do well if they can.” (p. 11) He thinks that children are aware of what’s right and what’s expected of them and that if they misbehave it’s because they lack the emotional or intellectual capacity to behave well. Now, I don’t completely agree with this idea. One of my fundamental observations about the world is that people—especially children—will try to get away with whatever they can. I think there are times when kids misbehave to get something they want or find where the limits are.

So while I don’t support this idea as a kind of “free pass” for kids to act badly, I do think this idea can help you deal with your negative reactions to some of their misbehavior. It’s human to feel frustrated about something you can’t change, but when it comes down to it, it’s useless to get really worked up about a problem if there’s nothing you can do to improve it. It’s easy to get frustrated with your stepchildren and ruminate about things they do that make you mad. It’s easy to complain about these things over and over. But stop and think: is this something that my stepchild truly has the emotional, intellectual, or physical capacity to effectively deal with? Sometimes kids are rude because they’re trying to be mean. Other times kids are rude because they’re overwhelmingly angry or sad and don’t know how to constructively communicate their feelings with the right words.

My fiancé jokes that my stepdaughter is the Wild Child from Borneo. She usually comes over with food crusted on her face and mats in her hair, she has a hard time holding utensils and mostly eats with her hands, and she ends up spilling food and drink on the floor just about every time she’s here. I never gotten away with this kind of behavior at her age and I find myself frustrated with her over this kind of stuff. Then I remind myself that “children do well if they can.” She’s always been about a year behind in learning things; plus, I have to remember that it’s harder for her to learn things if her mother isn’t also teaching her at her other house. Neither of these challenges are her fault or my fault.

Their Mother

From my hunting around on stepmother message boards it seems like a lot of stepmothers feel, at least at some point or another, that the mother of their stepchildren is not doing a very good job with them. So what's does this have to do with you loving your stepkids? I don't have any research about this yet, but there's a part of me that sometimes feels—and this is hard for me to admit—that sometimes the frustration I feel for my stepdaughter's mother spills over to my stepdaughter. Being angry at her mother for letting her eat junk food and look like a wild child sometimes turns into me being mad at my stepdaughter for eating junk food and looking like a wild child. However, getting frustrated at her for things that are not her responsibility to control is not conducive to a loving relationship.

This can be tough because there’s a lot I shake my head at. My stepdaughter is constantly eating McDonald's, candy, chips, and all kinds of junk food. She stays up late but never gets a nap. She always needs her hair cut and her face washed. Her mother dresses her in high heels and lets her daughter argue with her and boss her around. Sometimes I just feel so puzzled by how she treats her daughter or lets her daughter treat her.

Interestingly, while reading Step-Motherhood: How to Survive Without Feeling Frustrated, Left Out, or Wicked** by Cherie Burns I came across the following passage that might help explain some of this:

“Divorced mothers frequently do, it seems, abdicate certain aspects of mothering when a family breaks up. Their world is often shattered, and they seem to relegate their children to the backburner . . . Stepmothers frequently complain about how badly the children are dressed. Complaints about table manners run a close second.” (p. 47) Burns goes on to quote a councilor as saying, “Her reward is not the same when the family’s not all there” (p. 47-48).

So while it may feel frustrating to see our stepchildren pushed to the backburner, maybe we should think about their mother in a grown-up version of how we look at our stepchildren: “people do well if they can.” All women love their children. If your stepchildren’s mother could do better then she probably would. So just like you can’t change your stepchildren’s behavior if they aren’t capable of what you expect they should be able to do, you can’t expect their mother to do more than she is capable of, either. It must be hard to send your children off to another woman, and I can only imagine how hard it must be to be a single mother.

(I try and remind myself of this every time my stepdaughter shows up in those little blue high heels.)



* The Explosive Child by Ross W. Greene Co. 2005 by Ross W. Greene; Harper.

**Step-Motherhood: How to Survive Without Feeling Frustrated, Left Out, or Wicked by Cherie Burns Co. 1985 by Cherie Burns; Times Books.

Don't Try Too Hard

Despite what some people might tell you, stepmothers shouldn’t feel pressured to do things that make them unhappy at the expense of trying to make their stepchildren happy. This week I read Step Wise: A Parent-Child Guide to Family Mergers by James Dale and Alex Beth Schapiro and buy urine kit. This book has some great points, but there are few things in there that rub me the wrong way. For example this urine, they suggest that stepparents should listen to music they don’t like with their stepchildren, watch TV shows they don’t like with their stepchildren, and go to movies they don’t like with their stepchildren, etc. etc. Halfway through the book they state, “the point is that you give and they get; the point is that they come ahead of you” (Dale & Shapiro 2001) and fake urine.

Now, I understand that compromise is a part of being a family quick fix. By all means go ahead and join your stepkids on the couch for an episode of Rap Stars or whatever every once and a while. But don’t start consistently doing a bunch of things you don’t like to do just because you think it’s going to make your stepkids like you more. You’re only going to end up feeling frustrated. You can buy quick fix synthetic urine

Gaining Affection from your Stepchildren, Part III

This week I’m sharing advice on some simple things you can do to start gaining affection from your stepchildren. These are little things to start out with, the kind you can begin with and then build on as time passes.

Praise Others
Research shows that people subconsciously associate us with the things we say about other people. This effect, called trait transfer, means that if you talk about how other people are selfish or annoying, others will associate you as being that way, too. So praise the people around you. Besides being a nice thing to do, your stepchildren will associate you as having the good traits you describe.

Do Small Nice Things
Do very small nice things for your stepchildren without calling attention to them or expecting a thank you. The theory of reciprocity says that when we receive a gift, we feel obligated to make a return gesture. Newsflash—your stepchildren don’t want to feel obligated to you. However, they do want to feel accepted and comfortable, and small gestures like cooking a favorite meal or going to a movie together are good for this.

I say small things specifically, because doing big things without expecting a return is hard. Even if you tell yourself that you’re bending over backwards for the good of the kids, you’ll still end up feeling resentful over time if you never get a thank you. Trust me, I know this one from experience!

Stepfamilies as "Reconstituted" Families

Five days ago my laptop died. My tech-savvy FH has tried each day since to coax it back from the grave, but to no avail. So here I am working on a borrowed computer and mourning the loss of the dozens and dozens (and dozens) of blogs and articles I had bookmarked.

As I’ve been fretting over all the scholarly articles I had saved in my Favorites list, I was reminded of something about them that’s been bothering me for a while. Namely, that a lot of the scholarly articles I’ve read about stepfamilies refer to them as “reconstituted families.” (See here , here, and here for a few examples.) One article even refers to stepfamilies as “recreating families."

This description frustrates me because I think it’s both degrading and inaccurate. The word reconstituted means that something has been “reconstructed, restored, or rearranged.” In reality, though, a stepfamily is not just a family that has been rearranged. A stepfamily is a completely new family with its own unique joys and challenges.

I think as a stepmother it’s important to keep in mind that our family isn’t any less valuable, any less real of a family, just because we or our spouse has children from a previous relationship. A family by definition is the bond between all sorts of relations: adults, children, aunts, uncles, grandparents, and third cousins; a family is the bringing together of people who love one another.