Reconstituted Families

This week has been really eye opening to me. We discussed divorce and remarriage which are things that I haven't given a ton of thought to before. I lived with my uncle this summer who has been divorced twice and he shared with me how emotionally challenging divorces are. As we looked at the challenges that face those getting remarried, especially if you have children from a previous marriage, I was shocked by how many forces are at play. From the continuing relationship that has to be  maintained with your ex, to disciplining step children, there are lots of things to think about. One thing that really stuck out to me from the things we read and talked about was how most of those getting remarried come into the marriage with unrealistic expectations, such as the kids will accept their new spouse, or that their new family will be the same as their old one. The thing I love most about this class is that by learning about these common oversights we are becoming well prepared to help others. We talked about some suggestions to help make the remarriage transition easier which I really liked. The first thing to be aware of is that it will take about two years to reach normalcy. That doesn't mean that life will be like it was before but that you will finally develop your schedules and reach a point where you are doing things on a regular routine that feels normal. The second advice was that the biological parent is the one who does the heavy disciplining. This made a lot of sense to me because you want to develop a good relationship with your new stepchildren before they will even start to listen to you or see you as a parent figure. The last counsel was that there will need to be lots of closed door conversations where you talk about the issues and problems that are going on and come up with ways to overcome them. I hope to never be in the situation where I need to go through the divorce and remarriage process, but I am grateful that I was able to learn about the problems those in that situation face. We watched an extremely touching music video by Brad Paisley which I will post the link to.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BjO1F6oCab8

This week I feel like I learned some things that helped me better understand who I am as a person and some of the experiences I went through as a youth. We spent most of this week talking about the work of Michael Popkins and his Active Parenting model. Popkins postulates that parents should respond to children's needs and not to their behavior. He said that their behavior is just a symptom of the need they have that isn't being met. This hit home with me especially as we went through the list of behaviors Popkins defined and what the corresponding need is. In my childhood, I rebelled a lot and Popkins says that is because I didn't feel powerful and the parenting approach my parents should have taken was to give me choices and consequences instead of just restricting what I did. My biggest problem with my parents was they were never willing to let me do things that I wanted so I felt powerless and I rebelled and did what I wanted behind their backs. I liked another one of Popkins scenarios, he said that children who engage in risky behavior are not having their need met to face something challenging. He said that as parents the way you could help fill that need is encourage your child to tackle something hard like building a car from scratch. I love Popkins ideas, it seems to make so much sense to me that our behavior is just symptoms. I would love to hear anyone who reads these ideas to comment about their childhood and if their behaviors were symptoms of their needs not being met.