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Advice on the Long Road to Family Building - More on the Art of Step-Parenting
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Children often feel confused, neglected and lost
in the midst of family-building.
One of the most challenging situations many of us will ever face on our journey to self-actualization is that of bringing two families together into one. I am intimately familiar with this challenge - many refer to it as the “Brady Bunch Syndrome” - now that I am 15 years into my second marriage, and both with children. As difficult as this can be for all concerned, it can also be tremendously rewarding - for both converging families, and the exes (assuming they are involved) - if you and your new partner play your cards right.
This is one of many relationship “Culture Clashes” I plan to visit repeatedly as an Examiner, to try and help tackle the many unique steps we all face on our life’s journey to romantic, psychological, and spiritual fulfillment. Remember: above all other reasons, when we find ourselves entangled with a particular partner in a relationship, at any time in life, it is a result of our inate desire to grow ourselves. The challenges that any partner presents to you are all challenges you know you need to overcome, with lessons and answers you need to assimilate into your life, to achieve self-actualization.
Contrary to what you may have been told all your life, it is all about you, and the sooner each of us comes to this realization, the sooner we will begin to represent the truest version of ourselves to our partners, our children, and to the Universe.
For this installment, let’s start with a basic relationship and parenting schism: there seems to be an overwhelming misconception in our culture that tells us that we are being unfair or even neglectful of our children, if we fail to put them and their sensitivities before our own. As a father of nearly 20 years, I can tall you this is flawed reasoning, and here’s why: consider the instructions we all receive in the cabin of an airplane before takeoff about a potential sudden loss of cabin pressure, and how to correctly don the oxygen masks in order to keep breathing regularly. We’re told to make sure our mask is on and tightened, before assisting children. At first, these instructions seem counterintuitive - our first reaction is to make sure the children are taken care of before ourselves. Of course, the reason we need to fit our masks before the children’s is so that we don’t lose consciousness, and then miss the chance to act to help them.
This is a perfect illustration of the misconception I mentioned above. If we don’t fulfill ourselves, if we don’t reach our own completeness, we’re hobbling our abilities as parents to fully satisfy our children’s psychological and spiritual needs. We’re actually presenting an incomplete version of ourselves to our children, a version that is often frustrated by this lack of fulfillment. In fact, I see examples again and again of parents who begin to resent their children, mistakenly blaming them for their own inability to achieve happiness.
Children learn, as we all do, primarily by example. What example are we giving our children when we disallow ourselves growth, love, and true happiness? The example we present them with is that this is a viable recipe for success in life, and a legitimate way to be a good parent. Conversely, what example are we showing our children when, as adults building a relationship that can ultimately lead to our own happiness and fulfillment, we focus on that relationship in order to achieve fulfillment and happiness? In this case, we’re showing them that we respect them so much that we don’t want to deprive them of our true, undivided, and untainted attention. We’re showing them that it is imperative that, as humans, we all must present the most honest, most complete, and most fulfilled version of ourselves to each other.
Sure, this may result in less focused attention on the children from time to time, as we focus more on hammering out our space in the relationship we’re building. But, more importantly, it nearly always results in an ability to interact with these young human beings as more complete, more satisfied, and more actualized adults - adults able to offer our undivided attention, free from resentment or any other distractions caused by a lack of fulfillment in our own lives.
In coming weeks, I’ll cover further adventures and interesting problems facing families in the midst of the “Brady Bunch Syndrome,” including discipline, favoritism, the children’s conceptions (and misconceptions) of their parents, new and exciting flavors of sibling rivalry, and many others. As always, if you have any opinions, stories, rants, or questions, please post a response to this column on Examiner.com. If you’d like to begin a confidential discussion, feel free to email me at any time.
To express in confidentiality, please email me at:
realadvice@nonsporgersi.net.
