A friend recently sent me this comment:
Sweetie, I need to ask you for some prayer. I’m struggling with my issues with K (stepson). He has such a bad attitude all of the time and is so disrespectful. I only ask that he shows me respect and yet he rolls his eyes or like today tells me that he’s going to the mall and I have to pick him up during rush hour, not asks. I get upset because these are totally disrespectful. So, he starts crying and calling his dad. It’s so hard because when he’s not around I feel so peaceful. I feel guilty because of this. What advice do you have?
Absolutely I will pray first of all, and I encourage you to pray for God to give you wisdom on how to love this stepson, strength to continue to face the days that will be difficult, as well as to help K feel God’s love and your love for him. You know most of the time children have had no say in us joining their lives, they are often still mourning and angry over losing their original parents, often their homes, towns, and entire life structures have changed. They face also the very real loss of the position in their family, their birth order position, and often the amount of time they spent with their dad/mom before you showed up. My stepchildren lost for all practical purposes being raised by their mother …and then six years later got married to a strange woman they had only met twice and moved 4oo miles away to a house with two younger, natural children who seemed to have everyone’s heart locally. How hard an act was that to follow….they were older, more awkward ages, and had been brought up entirely differently. Tough stuff.
My own very traditional military type family upbringing says solid discipline would cure all things….but in stepfamilies, the playing field is a bit different. When a natural child gets upset at a parent, they don’t have the option of moving to another parent’s home….or threatening to get another parent to go to court….or imply to extended family that you don’t love them the same, or are treated poorly….step children have that ability….if the adults and extended family around them allow the child to manipulate them that way. Natural parents don’t have to worry what a judge or advocate will say about this or that choice in most families lives. Divorce/remarriage brings many old emotions to the table from a marriage that obviously ended unsuccessfully…even if the parents have made peace, the children can easily play the cards just as they do in traditional families….
Step children/teen needs your unconditional love, especially when they are most unloveable. Loving any child is not always a sweet emotion, however, choosing to love them is always a choice, especially when undeserved. Now this doesn’t stop the stinkers from playing unfairly on their end, they are children and they do not play be the rules. Calling Dad when upset with you is a power play. Its a pure tactic…you are upsetting me and I am going to get you in trouble or at least get Dad to listen to my side. In the best case scenario, you and Dad are on the same page and Dad won’t fall for a quick fix from son. Les is a pro at this after the first year we were together. When an upset at stepmom call is made, he is quick to say, “let me speak to mom” and hears my side first then son’s (respect to putting his spouse first, child second…a very important Biblical order)…..which drastically changes what dynamics follow. I can truthfully say that when my stepson arrived at twelve and my stepdaughter at 16 it was very tense many nights as we combined two households ways of doing everything into one home. You see, even the best of saints can have trouble feeling warm and cozy feelings about a child who resents you, thinks you are lower than dirt, and regularly disrespects you in public and at home. We won’t even talk about what they can do to your belongings when angry… This is not limited to stepchildren…..I can assure you my fifteen year old tries every form of behavior my stepchildren wouldn’t have dreamed of….in other words, some of this rude behavior is part of trying out what others have done in front of him…and we have to continually work on what our family requires of him.
Now the real deal….how do you deal with it? My belief as a teacher is that I take the position that a child needs to be trained on the appropriate response. When Chaser says things like “I’m going to the tournament on Wednesday” as opposed to “Mom, since we made the finals, may I attend the tournament final?” I tend to say “Excuse me?” implying I didn’t hear his announcement, if he doesn’t immediately restate, I then calmly repeat to him what I expect to hear in question form ” Was that…”Mom, may I go to the tourament on Wednesday since our school won the district championship, I’ll take care of homework beforehand” If he then (even sarcastically) says it back to me, then we go forward, if he doesn’t, I don’t. If I then get silence, then I will say something to the effect “since you cannot ask to go appropriately, obviously I cannot say yes to your request” All of my children hear “Words of affirmation” as their primary love language, and that is not my primary way of showing my love, so I have to work really hard to continually build them up with words and not my actions! My primary love language is “Acts of Service” and let me tell you, it never crosses any of our children’s minds to do something that involves work as a way of loving me…..go figure!
How many times do I expect to have to continually go over the same behaviors? Well let’s see, Chase is fifteen and I think this week I repeated back to him about 1400 times an hour….well it seemed like it….bottom line, its a continual realigning for me what I expect to hear out of all of ours….and he isn’t the step child, he’s the natural one! When you and your husband decide to bury one behavior, be prepared to announce it, teach a correct response, then instigate it in about 3 days as the last day you’ll accept this without that happening. We did that on eye rolling….we warned the children about the problem, we demonstrated what we meant, we talked about it for 2 days continually, then day 3 it was fact…if you did it, you paid a price that was dear….regardless of why. Our belief was there were better ways for children to disagree with us, but eye rolling was totally out of bounds for us. Our choice, other parents don’t feel as strongly.
Meanwhile the physical responses, eye rolling, grunts (don’t you just cringe when they do) or under the breath mutters as they walk away, and tone of voice responses….this is instruction again you and your husband will need to agree on how is handled. At our house, the natural parent is the discipline responder, yet we decide standards together and privileges and consequences together. In other words, some behaviors are called out by us as contraband in advance. As in “In this house and to adults you may come across as authorities in your life, e.g. Church, school, library, you will say Yes Ma’am, No ma’am, and use a tone of voice and facial expression that implies they are worth listening to, and follow directives they give you w/o question unless you are in danger.” “If you choose to grunt, roll your eyes, talk disrespectfully, then you are automatically choosing to be home w/o privileges that night, and perhaps for as long as two weeks after that night or until you can consistently show us you have chosen to behave differently.” And be prepared to be challenged on that line in the sand. One of my son’s found it worth it to sit home an entire 3 months to have his say(you see that red headed sucker…nicest young adult in the world a few years later)….he had the right to behave that way if he was willing to pay the price, but we had set clear boundaries and he was hard headed, so it took a really long time before he was willing to change, it was worth whatever happened to him to be “in charge”…despite given many many opportunities to try again. We had weekly family jam talk sessions and still do…times to put on the table griefs and upsets that are happening as the family deals with blending issues. I remember one time a child said the only time he felt love was when he had clean socks in his drawer like his mom had done….and I thought to myself, adjusting to six folks in a house, working full time…”That child hasn’t felt loved more than 2x the whole time he’s lived with me” for my children had done their own laundry for years where socks were concerned….I simply didn’t know his expectation or need.
My stepchildren were much older than any natural child I had in the early days….and though I was a high school/middle school teacher at the time, at school you have heavier hammers over their head when they misbehave than you do as “step mother”. I won many battles but lost many wars until Dad and I got on the same page about expectations. They ran the gambit from calling their sympathetic natural grandmother…and telling her sad sad stories of the wicked stepmother’s mistreatment, which she readily believed, always fearing they would be treated badly by a step parent.(haven’t you watched ANY television lately, all stepmothers are evil, all stepdad’s abusers) During those days I would hear the backlashes from all sides….and privately thought “Why am I saving, slaving, and working 2 jobs to do for this family….if this is the payback” And truly, the child doing it usually is just as miserable as you are receiving it deep down….they want to us to be proud of them, want to be accepted, want to be loved, even if they don’t show it.
Yet, any power play they put out was just that, an attempt to gain power in the marriage/family dynamic, and believe me, the grandma calls for a while got them BIG power that was detrimental to our authority. (are you listening Grandma’s…think carefully when you hear only one side, I know you wouldn’t approve of what he/she is doing if you’d been there!, they are teens, they are going to work all sides of the systems, its a teenage union rule apparently)
Raising childen and stepchildren is tough stuff….I highly recommend Ron Deal’s website : http://www.successfulstepfamilies.com/ and http://www.stepfamilyradio.com/ as resources for how to approach the issues we face as families. Of course, my favorite resource on parenting is Proverbs and the Psalms….God teaches us clearly how to deal with those who despise us, disrespect us, and disobey us but unfortunately stoning the offending teenager at the edge of the village is no longer an acceptable solution. 🙂 But loving our children and enemies is a commandment, so we must choose to love even the difficult ones! We must work through new solutions together and love these children and ourselves through it!
Part Two to be continued: I feel guilty because there is no peace when my stepchildren are around…
