Guiding Your Child With New Family Members

When you take pains to include all the relatives from your current marriage as well as your children from your previous marriage, you will have one big happy family. You would need to take pains to ensure everyone feels comfortable for each one you must remember comes from a different background with a different thought process. It is important for everyone to respect each other’s privacy and opinion and give them space. Their culture and value systems would have been influenced from the environment that they have grown up with and brought up by their other parent.
No child would be willing to or wanting to accept a step parent in the place of one’s own parent unless of course the bonding with the step parent gets to be very loving and stronger. To a large extent the quality of relationship and acceptance would depend upon the way the child is treated and approached by the step parent too. If there is a natural understanding and empathy in the case of the child, then the relationship with the step parent is likely to be smooth.
The children are further likely to get upset emotionally or resent the arrival of new siblings into the family in due course of time. But then a large part of their reaction could be managed by parents who can learn to handle the situation very maturely and thoughtfully.
The children are likely to often fight and be aggressive towards each other exhibiting jealousy, resentment as well as anger with an underlying resentment of each other and wanting the attention of the parents to oneself.
If you as parents work together and are willing to focus on bringing all children to accept each other as well as get them to understand that they are all loved by you as parents equally and each one is important, then you can build one happy family in no time. These guidelines might come in handy for you:
It is important for each parent to spend quality time alone with each child. Only with one to one communication can you reach out and get the child to communicate with you as well as build the trust and comfort level.
You get a marvelous opportunity to get to know the child better and understand his personality, his likes and dislikes as well as his interests etc. This is the best chance that you get while spending time with him to let him know that you love him.
It is important for you to spend all your free time with the child and do things that he enjoys doing. It helps to get involved with his life and stand by to support his activities as well as interests. When he finds you being there to support and not only to criticize, he will naturally accept you as the parent over a period of time and perhaps call you mom or dad.