Relationship red flags & blended families
A few weeks back we started sharing powerful advice from medical doctor and insightful premartial counsellor Dr Sharon Earle Edwards for women getting married or healing from divorce. Dr Earle Edwards reminded women that they are ready to remarry when they don’t need to remarry. This week we continue with her advice about identifying red flags, as well as managing a blended family.
Q: What are some of the red flags people should look out for when pursuing a relationship?
A: One of the greatest red flags is character flaws and being mindful of those signs. Dishonesty is a big one. Boundary issues. Lack of self-control. Significant differences can be a challenge as well, whether it is in age, education levels, in beliefs — all of these can be challenges.
Additionally, part of living healthy as it pertains to divorce is ensuring that you gave the relationship your best shot so that you have no regrets. Another thing is to discover or rediscover your gifts, skills, strengths, and passions as part of the healing and advice to women contemplating divorce.
Q: When divorced women eventually get into a new relationship and children are involved, it can be tricky. What are your top four points of advice for blended families?
A: Adjustment takes time, so be patient. It is very important to recognise that, for a couple, any couple, it takes time to adjust to each other, even more so when children are involved. It takes time, be patient.
Build relationships – be proactive
In this situation of a blended family, it’s very important for the prospective step-parent to spend time, even before marriage, building a relationship with their partner’s children as far as possible, recognising that they may get resistance and pushback from the children. But just to do your part in building the relationship. Be intentional, make the first move.
Create new rituals and be purposeful
Each family may have had certain rituals, but this new blended family needs to come up with its own rituals and this is healthy when it’s more child-centred. So, for instance, it can be a family games evening or a regular family outing or family devotions, movie time — things that bring the family together.
Discipline
Discipline needs to be meted out by the biological parent and over time an adjustment can be made. Each parent may feel the discomfort and the anxiety when they hear from children: “You are not my mother; you are not my father.” Children are more likely to respond to their biological parent, but it doesn’t mean the couple can’t be on the same page. Be on the same page, but leave one to execute the joint decision.
Expectations
Manage your expectations. The old time Brady Bunch image is not the typical situation in which the blending almost seems to happen seamlessly, so manage the expectations and recognise that children have different personalities and so some of the issues that come are not necessarily because of the fact that there is ‘blendedness’, but that of the unique personality of the child and how that unfolds and how the personality differences impact the relationship. So give it your best shot but recognise that there will always be different levels of connectedness and recognise that adjustment takes time.
Ultimately, one of the things for a blended family is to recognise that just as in the original nuclear family, the marriage needs to be prioritised. So children don’t come above the spouse in neither the original nuclear family nor the blended family.
In addition to serving as a premarital counsellor, Dr Sharon Earle Edwards is also author of PILLS for The Happy Soul (Prescription, Inspiration, Life Lessons for Success). Shelly-Ann Harris is the author of God’s Woman and the Goodies on Her Tray.
