Adjusting to a Blended Family
What's the best way for a stepmother to help a young child feel safe and loved in a new family?
A child with two families yearns to be loyal to her birth parents and to still feel at home with both sets of parents.
Q: My husband has a 3-year-old daughter from a previous marriage who stays with us on alternate weeks. The three of us do fun and educational things and spend a lot of time together. She and I are very close. At the end of the week, she goes back to her mother and stepfather. When she returns to us, she is standoffish for the first day. Then everything gets back to normal. Last week when we picked her up, she told her father that I was not her mommy and that she has two daddies. I have never asked her to call me mommy; she calls me by my first name. I point out that she and I are really good friends; "Mommy" is her one and only mommy. I try to stress the fact that what is most important is that a lot of people love her and want to care for her. Am I taking the right approach? What do you suggest?
A: Your approach is warm, kind, and appreciative of your stepdaughter's predicament: She yearns to be loyal to both her birth parents and to still feel at home with both sets of parents. It seems to me that she is doing a remarkably good job of accomplishing these goals. It is wonderful that her emotional reentry to your home takes only one day. Many children in similar situations barely begin to warm up when it is time to leave again. Moving each week is bound to be unsettling. Questions about who is a real mommy and how many daddies indicate her struggle to make sense of things, rather than a rejection or complaint about anyone.
Perhaps it would help to share some observations about the way a child so young is likely to think about all this. We start with the fact that she is only 3. At her age and even older, most children, including those who live in "traditional" nuclear family arrangements, can't truly comprehend how two sets of grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins are related to them yet not to each other. Let's look at another example: a child of 6 who when told that a particular uncle is on his mother's side of the family, while certain cousins are on his father's side, thought for a moment, before announcing, "I guess I should be on Daddy's side too, because Daddy's a man, and I am going to be a man when I grow up." The boy's carefully considered yet obviously wide-of-the-mark conclusion should give you some idea about tough it is for young children to make sense of the separate spheres of family. Since young children are normally egocentric, it is mystifying to them that all their relatives are not related to each other. That goes for so-called intact families as well as blended ones.
So, much of your stepdaughter's chatter about how many real or unreal mommies or daddies she has is very probably an effort to clarify things for herself. While it's easy to assume that her mother is putting ideas into her head, it's very likely the child herself who is hard at work, trying to make sense of it all with a 3 year old's capacity for deduction.
You and your husband should be patient and try very hard not to be insulted by his little girl's reentry moods or remarks. You are doing a wonderful job — loving the child as a stepmother, tolerating her remarks that sound like rejections or accusations, and emphasizing the important fact of how universally loved and accepted she is. All that's left is for you to put yourself into the mind of a very bright, fun-loving little girl who still has a lot of brain development ahead of her. Along with her maturing cognition will come a better understanding of the roles played by all the loving adults who surround her.
Adele M. Brodkin, Ph.D., is a psychologist, consultant, and author of many books, including Fresh Approaches to Working With Problematic Behavior and Raising Happy and Successful Kids: A Guide for Parents. In addition, she has written and produced award-winning educational videos.
