Depression and Parental Alienation: The Connection
Understand how parental alienation relates to depression, how it harms your child, and what you can do to prevent it.
Newsletter
Fathers in Stepfamilies: 3 Do’s and Don’ts
Remarried fathers often struggle with balancing their relationships with their biological children and those with their step children. Fathers feel guilty for spending more time with their step children than with their biological children due to custody arrangements. Biological children get jealous of their stepsiblings for that very reason. Identifying the guilt and working through it is very helpful for both fathers and children.
Here are some dos and don’ts to help you strengthen your relationship with the children.
Newsletter
When Being a Nice Stepmother Is Not Enough: 7 Steps to Enjoying Your Stepchild’s Graduation
Stepfamilies facing life’s milestones, like graduation, experience a great deal of anxiety. It’s made worse when the relationship between two households is challenged due to an insecure parent feeling threatened by a stepparent. Your goal is to celebrate the occasion.
Consider the following steps to help you and your stepfamily enjoy your child’s graduation celebration.
Newsletter
5 Ways to Ruin Stepfamily Holidays
You may be wondering whether it’s possible to be any more stressed out with the upcoming holiday than you already are. It is. Here are 5 holiday killers and effective to beat them.
Newsletter
Valentine’s Day is for Kids, Too
Busy Moms and Dads can easily downplay Valentine’s Day or ignore it outright by thinking it’s just “for them” and ignores the needs of their children. Wrong! Valentine’s Day is for kids too, but probably not the way you assume.
A good couple’s relationship is the foundation for a successful, happy family.
Newsletter
Valentine’s Day – The Importance of Celebration
Put your cares and worries aside for Valentine’s Day and make sure this special time for husbands and wives is celebrated and not ignored. It’s an important yearly milestone of your love and commitment for one another.
Newsletter
Making Valentine’s Day #1
Valentines Day is a symbolic reminder of taking care of your relationship. What does that mean? Romance often takes a back seat to demands of family life such as children’s schedules, schooling, doctor’s appointments and so on. But every couple needs time alone and time to reacquaint. The home “fires” must keep burning!
Newsletter
Inconsistent Parenting in Remarriage
Many men find themselves spending much more time with their stepchildren than with their biological children, simply because of their custody agreements. Fathers see their biological children’s stay with them as visits, rather than “living with them,” so they treat them like VIP guests and set fewer limits and looser behavioral expectations.
These double standards drive a wedge between the couple, confuse the children, and foster resentment all around. Here’s how to handle them.
Newsletter
Tips for Applying Your New Year’s Resolutions
Another year went by. You may feel the anguish of yet more missed opportunities to last year’s resolutions for a more peaceful and fun stepfamily experience. If you do, you are not alone. Many step-families share your pain. You can make a difference in this coming year. Implement these 6 easy tips and you’ll experience a difference in how you connect with your step-family.
Newsletter
Practical Remarried Couples Unity Tips
Remarriage can be the best time of your life. You have to wonder whether the bliss can last in the face of intrusive exes, stepchildren acting-out, and a confused spouse. You probably had a sketchy vision of what your marriage would look like, only to find out that the reality of simultaneously starting a marriage and forming a stepfamily is much more complex than you ever imagined.
The glue that binds the family together is the couple, without which there naturally wouldn’t be a family. A healthy, close, loving couple relationship determines the wellness and success of not only the marriage, but of the whole family. The following 5 tips will help you plan, develop, and implement a blue print for an even deeper connection with your spouse.