Stepfamilies: why “mine, yours and ours” takes time

Sunday, the first lunch together in the new flat. She has made beef soup because her two children love it. His daughter announces that they don’t eat soup at her mum’s, and pushes the bowl away. Her son asks why he has to sit on “this” chair when his chair in the old flat was the one by the window. He tries a joke; nobody laughs. That evening, while they are clearing up, one of them says: “I thought we’d be a family by now.”

“By now” means three months. Hidden in that sentence is the idea that does stepfamilies the most harm: that the love between two adults will, of its own accord, spill over onto everyone sitting at the table. The American psychologist Patricia Papernow, who has studied stepfamilies for decades, described, on the basis of interviews with their members, that even the families who moved fastest needed about four years to arrive at a sense of “us”, and average families around seven. Not months. Years.

In this post I would like to show why that is. Not because anyone at the table is being difficult, but because a stepfamily is a differently built system. Once you understand that, much of what looks like personal rejection becomes an expected part of the road.

A stepfamily is not a repaired first family

We speak of a stepfamily when at least one of the partners has a child from an earlier relationship. Professionals also use the terms blended or reconstituted family (see the entry Stepfamily), and in everyday Slovenian the phrase that has stuck is “mine, yours and ours”. Any of these is better than the one people carry in their heads: “the new family”, as if the old one had ceased to exist.

It hasn’t. In a first family the couple comes first and has time to find its rhythm, then the children arrive, and together they spend years building habits, jokes, rules and a history. In a stepfamily the order is reversed. The bond between parent and child is older than the couple, often by a whole decade. The child has another parent who lives elsewhere, or who is no longer alive but is very present in the child. And two groups of people sit down at one table, each with its own idea of how soup is eaten, when bedtime is and what “tidy your room” means.

The basic idea that nobody in a family acts purely on their own is explained in the post The family as a system: why one member’s change moves the whole family. Seen that way, a stepfamily resembles a merger of two companies, each with its own culture, in which some of the staff also hold a contract somewhere else. Expecting this to run like one well-drilled team within a few months is not optimism; it is the wrong plan.

Insiders and outsiders: who sits where

Papernow describes five challenges that a stepfamily brings with it simply because of how it is built. The first is the most everyday one: in almost every scene, somebody is inside and somebody is outside.

A parent and their child share a language. They know what a certain look means, which song gets sung in the car, what is not talked about before bed. The new partner does not speak that language. When the child runs into the room and starts telling a story, the parent turns towards them, and the partner, who was mid-sentence a second ago, is left outside. This does not happen once; it happens ten times a day. Whoever is outside feels invisible and surplus, sometimes jealous of a child, and ashamed of it.

The parent is in a different position that is no easier: stuck on the inside. Both the child and the partner need them, each of them has a point, and whatever the parent chooses, somebody is let down. A common sentence is: “I feel like an interpreter whom both sides accuse of taking the other’s part.”

What matters is that these two positions are not the result of ill will. They are the result of structure. Partners who know this can talk about what it is like for one of them to be outside and for the other to be in the middle, instead of arguing about who is hurt more. That is no small difference. In the first conversation they are on the same side, looking at a problem; in the second, each is the other’s problem.

What the child loses when the adults gain something

For the adults, a new relationship is a gain: after a divorce or a loss, there is once again someone it is good to be with. For the child, the same change is first of all a series of losses. They lose the parent who, for a while, was theirs alone. They lose the hope that Mum and Dad will get back together, which children often carry long after the adults would swear that everything is clear to everyone. Sometimes they lose a room, a school, their place as the eldest or only child, the rhythm of their Sundays.

I wrote about what protects children when their parents separate in Children and divorce: what the research really says about what protects them. For stepfamilies, one point from that post matters most: children are burdened less by any single event than by changes piling up. A new partner, a move, new step-siblings and new rules in the same year are a great deal for a child, even if each of those changes is good in itself.

That is why a child’s reserve or resistance is not a verdict on the new partner. It is grief that does not yet have words. The researcher E. Mavis Hetherington, who followed families after divorce for several decades, found that the arrival of a new partner tends to be hardest in early adolescence, when a child is pulling away from adults anyway and really does not need another one. Younger children usually adjust more easily. If you have a teenager at home, When parents divorce: what a teenager really needs is also worth reading.

The loyalty bind: “If I like her, I’m betraying Mum”

The family therapist Ivan Boszormenyi-Nagy spoke of invisible loyalties: the ties that keep a child faithful to both parents even when it costs the child dearly. In a stepfamily that faithfulness is caught in a bind. If I have a nice time with Dad’s partner, what does that mean for Mum? If I smile at my stepfather, have I betrayed my father?

A child does not think it through this neatly. From the outside, the conflict shows up as a closed door, as “you’re not my mum”, as a child who is relaxed with one parent and unreachable for two days after coming back from the other. Adults tend to read this as rudeness, or as proof that “she, over there” is turning the child against them. More often it is a child trying to be loyal to two homes at once.

A conversation between a father and his ten-year-old daughter might sound like this (composed; not a real person):

“Tina said the two of us could go and buy shoes on Saturday.”
“That’s nice. Would you like to?”
“I don’t know. Mum will ask who I was with.”
“And what happens if you tell her?”
“Nothing. She just goes quiet afterwards.”
“I see. You don’t have to choose. Mum is still your mum, even if you sometimes have a good time with Tina.”

That last sentence is what a child needs most, and it works best when both parents say it, each in their own home. A child does not have to love the new partner. But they need to be allowed to, if it happens. The loyalty bind tightens every time adults speak badly of one another in front of the child or question them about what it is like “over there”. At that point the child becomes the third party in a dispute between two adults, which is what we call triangulation.

How long is “time”?

Papernow described the development of a stepfamily in seven stages, which she groups into three phases. In the early phase the family lives on a picture of how things will be (“the children will be glad to have a whole family again”), then it is immersed in a reality that has little in common with that picture, and slowly it becomes aware of what is actually going on and how each person feels. In the middle phase the differences begin to be spoken aloud. This looks like things getting worse, but it is in fact the first sign that people dare to speak, and the adults start to make decisions as a team. Only in the later phase does real contact grow between the new partner and the children, along with the sense that the family is solid, even though it is not the same as the first one.

Families linger longest at the beginning. In her account, faster families covered the whole road in about four years and average families in around seven, while some stayed stuck in the early phase for longer still, or separated before then. These figures need to be read with care: they come from interviews with a relatively small number of families and from clinical work, not from a large representative study. They are not a deadline by which everything must be sorted out, and they are not a promise that peace arrives after seven years.

They do, however, say something that recurs across stepfamily research more generally: the unit of measurement is years. Anyone who concludes after six months that “this isn’t working” is judging a house by its foundations. And anyone who knows that the disappointment following the early fantasy is a stage rather than the end can bear it more easily, without looking for someone to blame.

The couple in the middle: a relationship with no honeymoon

In a first family the couple is the foundation on which everything else stands. In a stepfamily the couple is the youngest and most fragile part of the system, surrounded by bonds that are older and stronger than it is. The new partners get no honeymoon; what they get, from day one, is an audience.

The family therapist Salvador Minuchin described the family as an interplay of subsystems, the couple, the parental and the sibling subsystem, with boundaries running between them. A stepfamily has more of these subsystems, and the boundaries between them have not yet been drawn. Where there are none, coalitions form: parent and child against “the intruder”, the new partner and their child against the “spoilt” others, the child and the absent parent against the whole new household. A coalition is an alliance of two against a third, and it almost always tells you that somebody in the system has no place that is theirs alone. There is more on how boundaries between subsystems work in the entry Boundaries within a family.

Two things follow for the couple, which look like opposites but belong together. First: the partners need time that is theirs alone, otherwise the relationship shrinks to logistics and negotiations about children. Second: the parent needs time alone with their child, without the new partner, otherwise the child gets the message that they have lost their parent. This is exactly why Papernow advises against the family doing everything together at the start. Outings for “all of us” are the moments when the insider and outsider positions are at their sharpest. Relationships are built in pairs: parent with child, partner with partner, the new partner with a child over something small that interests them both.

The timing of a new relationship matters too. I wrote about how to tell that you are not simply running from the emptiness in A new relationship after divorce: when is it too soon and how do you know you’re ready.

“Mine, yours and ours”: two cultures under one roof

Every family has a culture it is unaware of until it collides with another. Whether phones are allowed at the table. Whether you knock before going in. Whether a loud argument is ordinary or a sign of catastrophe. How much a birthday present costs. In a stepfamily these unspoken assumptions meet every day, and each side is convinced that its own way is simply “normal”.

Slowness helps here. Two or three house rules that the adults agree on and that apply to everyone are enough to begin with; everything else can stay as it was for a while. It is easier for children if some old ritual survives, such as pancakes on Saturday morning with just Dad, and if a new one appears that has not been taken from either side. The question of who may say what to a child, and what to do about discipline, is big enough to have a post of its own: Stepmother, stepfather: a role without instructions.

The third word in the title, “ours”, is the child the couple have together. Couples sometimes hope that a baby will glue together what has not yet grown together. The researchers Lawrence Ganong and Marilyn Coleman, who have worked on stepfamilies for decades, caution that there is no firm basis for this hope: a shared child may connect people, but may also confirm the older children’s fear that they are now “the ones from before”. Deciding to have a child can be a lovely decision; the job of bringing the family together, though, is not the baby’s.

One more person belongs to a stepfamily without living in it: the child’s other parent. How well the adults in the two homes cooperate tells the child more than anything that happens in either one. That is the subject of Co-parenting after separation: how to stay a team when you are no longer a couple.

An exercise: a map of time in pairs

Take a sheet of paper and ten minutes. You can do the exercise alone, but it is better still if you and your partner each do it separately and then compare.

1. Write down the names of everyone who belongs to your family, including children who only come every other weekend. Arrange them in a circle.
2. Join every two names with a line. Next to the line, note when those two were last alone together for at least half an hour, and what they were doing.
3. Thicken the lines where that happened in the past week. Where you cannot remember when it was, make the line dashed.
4. Look at the picture. Where are the thick lines? Is the line between you and your partner one of them? Between the parent and each of their children separately?
5. Choose two dashed lines and put one short slot for each in next week’s calendar: twenty minutes, one activity, no big conversations.

The exercise does not measure love. It shows where relationships are being given time and where they are expected to grow by themselves. If it helps, put the slots in a family calendar so that everyone can see them.

Where “give it time” is not the answer

The idea in the title has limits, and it is only fair to state them.

Time does nothing by itself. A family in which nobody talks for seven years about how they feel is no closer after those seven years, only more settled in its silence. The years help only if something happens in them: if the child gets time with their own parent, if the couple can stay in uncomfortable conversations, if the adults in the two homes stop competing.

“Be patient” is not the answer either when someone in the family is at risk. If there is violence or intimidation in the home, or a child is afraid of someone, that is not an adjustment phase. In Slovenia you can call the SOS helpline for women and children who are victims of violence on 080 11 55 or the police on 113, and children and young people can call the TOM helpline on 116 111.

A third limit: the goal is not necessarily one close-knit family. A teenager who acquired a stepparent at sixteen, or an adult child, may never experience that person as a member of the family, and that is not a failure. Respectful coexistence, in which everyone has their place and nobody demands feelings that are not there, is a good outcome. Some families remain more “mine and yours” than “ours”, and live well.

And finally: not everything that happens to a child is connected with the new family. If a child sleeps badly for a long stretch, withdraws from friends, slips at school or says that nothing is fun any more, that is a reason to talk to a paediatrician or the school counselling service, not to wait for them to “get used to it”.

When it is worth looking for help

Help makes sense when the same argument keeps repeating without any movement, when the partners talk about the children only as opponents, when one of the children has long been cast as the one to blame for everything, or when one of the adults is seriously thinking about leaving although they do not want to.

The professional guidance on working with stepfamilies is interesting here: Papernow advises that therapy should not, as a rule, begin with everyone in the same room. It is better to start where there is a bond, with the couple or with a parent and their child, and only later put together larger groups. This matches what holds for building relationships at home.

In relational family therapy, the approach I am training in, we are interested in something beyond structure as well: what each adult brings into the new family from the previous relationship and from the family they grew up in. The feeling of being on the outside is much harder to carry for someone who was pushed aside as a child. A parent consumed by guilt over the divorce finds it hard to set a limit for their child. Once these older layers are recognised, the present-day scenes lose some of their charge. As a therapist in training under supervision in marriage and family therapy, I work with couples and families in person in Ljubljana, in English as well as Slovenian; if you recognise yourself in any of this, you are welcome to write to me.

What to remember

• A stepfamily is not a repeat of the first one: the bond between parent and child is older than the couple, and the child has another home and another parent.
• In almost every scene somebody is inside and somebody is outside. That comes from the structure, not from ill will.
• A child’s resistance is often grief and loyalty to the other parent. They do not have to love the new partner; they do need permission to.
• The unit of measurement is years. Papernow describes about four for faster families and around seven for average ones, as a guide and not a deadline.
• Relationships are built in pairs, not on group outings: parent with child, the partners alone, the new partner with a child over something small.