Reality was never much of a problem for television’s “Brady Bunch,” a stepfamily scenario in which a widow and widower merged her three girls and his three boys into a happy family without financial woe or even the emotional baggage of longing for the lost parents.
But blending families is about as easy as crossing a mine field, according to family and school counselors and stepfamily members. It’s navigable, but things could blow up at any moment.
And they will have problems, according to the Stepfamily Association of Illinois. “Fifty percent of all marriages today are remarriages for at least one of the parties,” said cofounder Peter Gerlach of Oak Park. “Of these, approximately 60 percent will (end in) divorce,” said Gerlach, who has spoken to church and school groups throughout the state, including Lake County.
More Top Picks Executive Function Skills How To Build Them In Kids
He sees part of the problem as a tendency for divorced people to make another commitment without understanding or resolving the underlying causes of the first marriage’s disintegration. But he also blames remarriage failure on the scarcity of guidelines for success.
“There’s a screaming public need for clear information,” Gerlach said. Most people entering a blended family union have no idea what’s involved, he said.
The fall issue of Stepfamilies, a quarterly newsletter published by Stepfamily Association of America Inc. in Lincoln, Neb., noted that by the turn of the century, stepfamilies will outnumber other kinds of families, meaning stepfamily issues must be faced.
School districts recognize that fact. School social workers in Lake County reported that split-family peer discussion groups became common in the 1980s. “Most school districts in Lake County have discussion groups for children of divorce and stepfamilies,” said Highland Park elementary school social worker Bonnie Mavis.
Mavis, who started volunteer support groups for children dealing with divorce and stepfamilies at Indian Trail School in 1984, said children needed “a safe place” to express their feelings.
“The groups are helpful to children who do not have someone to talk to who wouldn’t get upset,” she said.
But stepfamilies negotiating through the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s had few books, articles or experienced counselors to help them through the challenges.
“It was new ground being plowed,” said Illinois Sen. Grace Mary Stern (D-Highland Park), who merged her four children with Herbert “Hub” L. Stern’s three children more than 31 years ago. “Remarriage following divorce was not as common as today.”
And his children, who lived with their mother, hated the idea of someone else moving into their house, even though they no longer lived there, she said.
“Now they are 43, 45 and 47, and we are great friends,” Stern said. “But it was many years before they came to see me as their friend. It took a lot of hard work and diplomacy-and time.”
Asked if she worried about possible pitfalls beforehand, Stern said: “I suspect I didn’t anticipate problems. I’m not somebody who would examine that. I tend to feel I can handle it, I can do it.”
That is a common but dangerous attitude, professionals warn.
“The biggest problem is they have too high expectations from TV,” said Carol Fitzsimmons, clinical director of Family Service of South Lake County in Highland Park. “On TV everything works out. Everyone has a laugh. I’ve had people come in saying they knew it would be a challenge, but they think the reason they have problems is that they messed up.
“Perhaps the most important thing we have to tell them is that not everything is going to go smoothly,” she said.
Even though they offer no easy answers and insist that each situation is different, Fitzsimmons and other counselors have a few suggestions to ease the way.
“A strong relationship between the couple will make the going easier,” Fitzsimmons said. “If they’re shaky, the assorted relatives in the mix will further strain the relationship. And kids will react to that shaky relationship. The better it looks, the more solid, the more kids will take a chance on investment.”
Linda Hewitt, a social worker at Family Network Inc. in Highland Park, explained the problem, saying: “The two people do not have a chance to be a couple on their own without children. The natural parent is caught in the middle between children and new spouse, wanting to please both, be responsible to both.”
Giving the relationship time to work and children time to adjust is also important, the counselors said. “Do not expect a stepfamily to be a family instantly,” Mavis said. “It takes time to build love.”
But that love blooms easier when the biological parents have allowed it to grow.
When clinical social worker Shari Jacobson, a partner in Associates in Family Therapy of Lake Bluff, asked one of her young clients about the best part of blended families, the response was “so many more relatives to love you.”
But the worst, in a sense, also centered on love and relatives. “The child became attached to the stepdad. But he loved his biological father. And the biological father would get very upset every time he heard the stepfather referred to as dad,” Jacobson said.
Even though she empathized with the biological parent, saying that it could be “heart-rending,” Jacobson said, “The ideal is that adults understand that it’s good for children to be well taken care of and understand that it’s not a reflection on the biological parent,” she said.
She suggested, however, that if the biological parent or the child could not handle it, then the family “should negotiate a different (name) than dad.” That is what the merged Barris and Heller family of Highland Park did.
When Joan Heller and Robert Barris wed six years ago, they included Joan’s children, Rachel, 9, and Eric, 6, in the ceremony. “(The rabbi) didn’t say Joan and Bob. It was do you Rachel, Eric and Joan take Robert and vice versa,” Joan said. “The four of us got married.”
But even with the joint commitment, Rachel had problems accepting a new adult male as part of the family. “I had trouble applying the word `dad’ to another male. . . . We wanted another word for him,” said Rachel, now nearly 15. The family settled on “Bob.” “It was a group decision,” said Eric, 12.
Joan, a social worker, recognized that even though age and gender differences played a part, Rachel’s attitude was particularly colored by loyalty. “Rachel had the most difficulty about my getting married. She worried about her father. She thought of herself as a rescuer for him,” Joan said. “Ideally both parents should help their children make the transition.”
More Top Picks How To Dim Screens To Reduce Eye Pain
She said that when it doesn’t happen, kids have more problems adjusting to new family structures because of a loyalty issue.
Children also worry about whose side the biological parent will take in discipline issues, according to Mavis. “Whatever authority you have (as a stepparent) you have gotten from the biological parent. You’re extremely dependent upon the other parent,” Bob Barris said. “You’re an adult, so you think … you can take care of kids. But there are more issues involved. There is the other (biological) parent. It’s more complicated.
“If you go into it thinking it will take care of itself, you’re in trouble from the start,” he said. Joan agreed, saying, “We work very hard at being a team.”
Jacobson thinks the biological parent should assume most of the discipline to allow the stepparent time to work into a child-parent relationship.
Counselors warn that youngsters will test the unity of the biological parent and stepparent.
Today, when Rachel Heller refers to her folks as in, “I have to check with my parents,” she means both Joan and Bob. “They’re my parents. They’re a package deal,” she said. But she remembers using the old you’re-not-my-parent standby phrase. Rachel admitted, “I pulled that so many times, it got boring. I had to figure out new phrases.”
Her advice? “When a kid says it, don’t believe it. The kid does not mean it,” she said. “Well, most of the time I didn’t mean it. Sometimes I did. It was one of those loyalty things.”