Successful Blended Families: Promoting Great Stepfamilies

By Dr. Mabel Radebe

According to experts, being involved in a prior marriage
decreases the success rate of subsequent marriages. The
aim of this book is to reduce the failure rate of remarriages
and to promote the success of blended families.
Successful Blended Families addresses the common challenges
of blended family life and provides practical tools for dealing with
them effectively. Attention is given to children in these families,
step-parenting, preparation for remarriage as well as the building
blocks for a successful blended family. If you are in a blended
family or planning to establish such a family, this book is for you.
If you are a professional who works with blended families or you
simply want to gain more insight and understanding of blended
family life, this book is worth reading.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris UK
• Release date: Jan 26, 2012
• ISBN: 9781469146652

Dr. Mabel Radebe

The author is a Counselling Psychologist with extensive experience in helping people to face the challenges of blended family life. She is the author of a book ‘Towards a better understanding of the Midlife transition: Understanding the Second adolescence’ (2009). She holds a doctoral degree in Psychology and has lectured at three universities in South Africa. She is married to Pastor Rapitsi and is currently in private practice as a psychologist.

Book preview

Copyright © 2012 by Dr. Mabel Radebe.

Library of Congress Control Number:       2012900239

ISBN:         Hardcover                               978-1-4691-4664-5

                   Softcover                                 978-1-4691-4663-8

                   Ebook                                      978-1-4691-4665-2

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

To order additional copies of this book, contact:

Xlibris Corporation

0-800-644-6988

www.xlibrispublishing.co.uk

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301238

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Preface

Chapter 1  A Blended Family

Chapter 2  Bumps, Traps, and Hazards on the Road

Chapter 3  Antecedents to Remarriage Challenges

Chapter 4  Children in Blended Families

Chapter 5  Step-parenting

Chapter 6  Preparing for Remarriage

Chapter 7  Remarriage Preparation Checklist

Chapter 8  Basic Ingredients for a Successful Blended Family

Chapter 9  The Building Blocks for a Successful Remarriage

Chapter 10  Success Tips from Blended Families

Recommended Readings

References

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Professor Sirayi for his unselfish devotion to my manuscript and his constructive criticisms.

Many thanks go to my husband and children for their encouragement and support along the way.

I am indebted to Bontshi Mphahlele and Sandile Radebe, who spent hours editing my manuscript. No words can ever adequately express my gratitude.

A word of thanks is due to Pastor Seleseng and all the couples and individuals who have opened their stories and shared with me their experiences of being in blended families. I thank you for your honesty and willingness to share with me and the readers of this book your successes, challenges, and setbacks as members of blended families. The tips you offered for succeeding in a blended family are highly appreciated.

My special appreciation goes to the researchers, clinicians, and authors whose work is referenced in this book.

Finally, my thanks go to the Almighty God, who enabled me to write this book.

Preface

Blended families are becoming a common feature in most communities. With the ever-increasing divorce rate and the birth of children out of wedlock, blended families are on the rise. As a result, there is a growing need to address the blended family challenges so as to promote an increase in the number of successful blended families and harness the escalating divorce rate of the remarried couples.

All families face challenges at one stage or another. Some of these challenges are minor and can easily be handled by a couple. Others are so serious that if timely intervention is not solicited, marriage breakdowns may occur. Blended families, by their very nature and composition, face additional challenges that put them at a higher risk of a breakdown than the traditional marriage and family.

It is estimated that the rate of divorce for remarriage far outnumbers that of first marriages, which is around 50 per cent. For example, the Step Family Association of America reports in its 1997 publication that 76 per cent of second marriages fail within the first five years, 87 per cent of third marriages, and 93 per cent of fourth marriages end in divorce within the same period of time (Bales, 2000). This troubling picture is also supported by David and Lisa Frisbie in their book Happily Remarried (2005, p 16) when they say: ‘According to the experts, being involved in a prior marriage actually decreases the odds of a second marriage becoming permanent and enduring.’

It is against this background information that a need to reduce the breakdown of remarriages arose. One way of making a contribution to the reduction of unsuccessful remarriages is by identifying and highlighting the qualities of successful remarriages and blended families and finding out what they are doing that prevents their remarriages from failing.

It is hoped that when these factors are identified and highlighted, they can be used as building blocks for successful remarriages and blended families and that the rate of remarriage breakdowns may decrease exponentially. It is equally important to bring to light the traps and obstructions that block the success of such marriages so as to ensure that the marital journey is enjoyed and ultimately completed when death separates the couple.

Why an Interest in Blended Families?

My own experience in a blended family motivated me to pay particular attention to such families with a hope of gaining a better understanding of my own experiences in a step-family. I also wanted to find out what makes some of these families successful while others fail. One of the major reasons for this interest was to ensure that my own blended family becomes a success.

Again, as a family therapist who works with blended families among other types of families, I developed an interest in documenting the challenges experienced by these families so as to alert those contemplating a remarriage about the hazards and sharp turns encountered on the roads of blended family life. Promoting such awareness in pre-marital preparation for a couple planning to remarry may help increase the overall number of successful blended families and decrease the unsuccessful ones. It is therefore hoped that this book will be of help in this regard.

Some of the experiences that couples and individuals shared with me about their blended family lives and how they perceive a blended family are documented in this book with their permission, with the hope that the shared information will be useful to the readers.

The Significance of the Book

The book is of great significance in promoting good mental health and the quality of family life. It has both preventive and remedial value in the area of blended family life. Since the quality of marriage and family life determines the mental health of society, it is important that healthy and successful families are nurtured and promoted to ensure good mental health of family members and of society as a whole.

Family life is supposed to be a joyous experience for all family members and divorce is to be prevented at all cost, as it is generally damaging to all family members involved. It often leaves emotional scars that last a lifetime. For blended family members with prior experience of divorce, the failure of remarriage is doubly wounding and should be avoided at all costs.

The Aim of the Book

The aim of this book is to promote healthy and successful blended families by highlighting the common denominators in successful blended families, the building blocks to the success of such families, as well as the bumps and traps to be avoided on the way. The book further offers the readers some practical ways of successfully dealing with the common challenges of blended family life, thereby promoting successful blended families.

For Whom is the Book Written?

• If you have experienced the end of a marriage through divorce or death of a spouse and have remarried or you are contemplating remarriage, this book is for you.

• If you are married to a person who has lost a partner through death or divorce and has children or you have children of your own, this book is for you.

• If you and your prospective spouse or one of you has a child or children that you will bring to the marriage, this book is for you.

• If you are a child in a blended family and wish to increase your satisfaction and happiness in this family, this book is for you.

• If you are in the helping profession and you work with people in remarriages and blended families, this book is a must-read.

• To all those who would like to increase their understanding of the dynamics of blended families, this book is worth reading.

What is Covered in the Book?

The book starts with a chapter that describes what a blended family is. It highlights the challenges of the blending process and explains the different types of blended families, including blended families in the Bible. This is followed by a chapter on common challenges of blended families and some practical ways of combating them. The third chapter takes a backward view of factors that give birth to the challenges discussed in the previous chapter and how these could be handled to prevent possible future challenges as prevention is better than cure.

Children in the blended families are discussed in chapter four, with a focus on the adjustment problems that they experience when a blended family is formed. The strategies to help them cope with the losses they have suffered and the unexpressed grief, issues of privacy, and incest in stepfamilies, as well as the conflicts children experience among themselves in blended families are given attention. Step-parenting is discussed in chapter 5 with an emphasis on the guidelines for effective step-parenting.

A journey through the various stages of remarriage preparation is taken in chapters 6 and 7, followed by a chapter on the basic ingredients for a successful remarriage. While chapter 9 highlights the building blocks used to set up a successful blended family, chapter 10 is about the shared experiences of people in successful blended families. This chapter gives hope to those contemplating or commencing the blended family journey, as it presents stories and experiences of those in successful blended families and how they overcame and are still overcoming the challenges on the road to ultimate success, which will happen when they are separated from their spouses by death.

Those who have learnt from their past mistakes and failures are also sharing their experiences in this closing chapter. They further give tips on how to avoid such failures in order to succeed in remarriage.

Questions to Ask as You Read this Book

• How do you visualise life in your blended family becoming one of the most satisfying experiences of your life?

• What myths do you have about blended family life?

• What unrealistic expectations do you have about remarriage?

• What are the traps to avoid on the road to a successful blended family?

• How can you deal with the unavoidable challenges encountered on the road of blended family life?

• What are the concrete practical things you can do to build a successful blended family?

Chapter 1

A Blended Family

Introduction

There are so many types of blended families that it is difficult to give a standard definition of such a family. When the various forms of blended families are perused, one can come up with one’s own definition of a blended family. In this chapter, the meaning of the term blending, what a blended family is as well as the different types of blended families with their unique challenges are discussed. The discussion ends with an overview of blended families in the Bible.

The Meaning of Blending

To have a better understanding of a blended family, it is important to define the word blending. According to the Oxford Universal dictionary, blending is to mix in order to get a certain quality or to mingle in order to form a mixture. It also refers to a mixture of different sorts. In cooking, the term blending is used to refer to a process of mixing different ingredients to form one fluid mixture. When the term blending is used in a family setting, it refers to different people brought together from different families to form a mixture of one family unit called a blended family. Since people are involved in this blending process and cannot be blended like none human items, the blending outcome differs qualitatively.

According to Webster, the term blending is used to refer to a process of fitting something harmoniously or fitting it in a way that does not show a perceptible separation or distinction. When the term is applied to a family unit, it means that the members of a family are put together and are expected to relate harmoniously and not show perceptible fragmentation.

A Blended Family

The term blended family is used to describe a family that has one parent who is not a biological parent of a child or children in that family. Such a parent is referred to as a step-parent and the family then becomes a step-family. The term ‘blended family’ is therefore used interchangeably in this book to mean one and the same thing as a step-family.

To children, a blended family is a family where a child or children live with one parent and a new spouse of that parent. This may include children of that spouse living with them or with their other parent. Children may sometimes have two blended families if both their parents are married to different people who may have children of their own.

In a traditional marriage, a man and a woman unite to form a family. When more than two individuals come together when a marriage takes place and a family is formed, the process of blending commences and a blended family is formed. This commonly occurs when one or both spouses bring a child or children to the marriage and one spouse becomes a step-parent.

A blended family may also include families where both parents are not the biological parents of a child or children but are either foster or adoptive parents. Other blended families include relatives of one or both spouses who form part of the family unit and share the same household