Speaker 1: 0:01

Welcome everybody. Today I want to do a couple things. First, I want to give you an update on how things went for the Oklahoma Bar Association annual meeting. Then I want to introduce our next series, which is going to be a series on discipline. I'm going to break down what I'm going to be discussing. I'm going to replay for you a past episode which is, I think, a really important one. I want to replay for you a past episode which is, I think, a really important one, which is episode number 42, is that family transitions are hard. So Linda, rebecca and I got to spend the week together at the Oklahoma Bar Association Annual Convention in Norman, oklahoma, and we had lots of great feedback, lots of good opportunities to talk to different judges and attorneys from across the state, got some great feedback about our site, co-parent Academy and the four-hour course that we just completed, and we're very excited to roll out the Co-Parent Academy for our course across the state here in the coming weeks. I'm still having a little bit of trouble getting over COVID, so my voice is still not quite what it has been and I keep trying to cough as I talk, so that's part of the reason why I'm keeping today short.

Speaker 1: 1:12

Starting next week we're going to introduce the Discipline series of podcasts, which will take about nine episodes. As I have it mapped out so far, it could change. I'll give you a little breakdown of what we're going to talk about. First we're going to talk about parenting styles. Then we'll discuss children's developmental stages and then we're going to hit into some source material about some very good ways to discipline children at different developmental stages. The first book we're going to discuss is Parenting with Love and Logic. Then we'll talk about how to talk so kids will listen and listen so kids will talk. Then we'll discuss raising an emotionally intelligent child and then no drama discipline. Each of those will be a separate episode where I give a sort of detailed summary of what each of those authors has to share with us about discipline.

Speaker 1: 1:56

With that foundation in place the parenting styles, the children's developmental stages and those four in-depth summaries of really great material on how to discipline kids then we're going to move into talking about discipline and co-parenting situations. So we're going to get into discipline in the wake of separation, so that really hard time right after separation and even up to a year or two after the initial separation. Then we'll talk about how to have consistent discipline in both homes. Then we'll discuss step parents and discipline. Now I may add some ideas along the way so we may have some additional episodes, but those are the ones that I think we're going to hit at this point.

Speaker 1: 2:36

So now I'm going to replay for you, I think, a really great episode. It was the episode number 42, step Family Transitions Are Hard. This episode is actually an excerpt from our Successful Step Families course, and so this will give you a sense of what that course is like if you choose to go to copernicademycom and purchase that for yourself. So here I hope you enjoy this excerpt about step family transitions and why transitions are hard for kids. We're going to be talking about some of the challenges for children and trying to connect with the new step family, and in this first topic we're going to talk about transitions just kind of generally, because one thing that we're dealing with in the step family dynamic is just a bunch of transitions for people of different ages, different developmental stages, different backgrounds, and transitions themselves are always hard. So, linda, why are transitions hard for kids?

Speaker 2: 3:37

I think they're hard for people of any stage of development.

Speaker 1: 3:41

That is true.

Speaker 2: 3:42

Even at my stage I'm still having one. So I think transitions are just hard because children especially need a lot of structure and they need for things to be reliable things. They can depend on what's going to happen, you know the next hour, much less the next day or the next week, and then they need a lot of consistency of what to expect.

Speaker 1: 4:02

And so how does that play into stepfamilies? How is it that that need for consistency, structure reliability makes the adjustments of becoming a stepfamily more stressful for kids?

Speaker 2: 4:15

Well, there's just a whole lot of extreme details when it comes to recombining in a, you know, recoupling in the first place and then recoupling with or without children, how many children if both have children? You know, it's just a very complicated process in many ways.

Speaker 1: 4:37

And it depends in part on how old the kids are. Yes, definitely, and whether it's a boy or a girl.

Speaker 2: 4:44

There's going to be a lot of compromise. I mean there is in any kind of coupling. You know that there's a lot of compromise and there can be a lot of, you know, from either person's family of origin and any kind of emotional baggage they've got from other relationships they've been in. So just exponentially increase that with involving children from one or both.

Speaker 1: 5:06

Right, and so we know that it takes kids a while to recover from divorce and that transition itself can take a couple of years for kids to start to make that transition. But coming into a step family will expand that transition process, especially if you jump quickly from being in the first family to having the separation, to now trying to introduce a step family. You're looking at taking the transition process for a kid to become more comfortable and to get sort of stabilized from being a year or two years You're now spreading that out up to seven years, according to the research.

Speaker 2: 5:39

Right, and especially if you overlay that with not having the time to grieve and transition to the loss of the first family as they knew it, that's going to compound that transition to the step family.

Speaker 1: 5:56

So I mentioned before that there's differences between boys and girls and kids of different ages, so let's talk about transitions for younger kids first. So if you have kids who are 9, 10 or younger, how is that? Is it going to be more difficult or less difficult for them to make this transition into a subfamily?

Speaker 2: 6:18

Well, I think in general of course not factoring in all the different personalities that are out there, if you have children with special needs or something that can be a lot more complicated but in general and I've seen this research bear out in my work through the years that the younger children seem to fare better. I would say, nine or 10 and under, boys tend to fare better than girls because they tend to be more, you know, occupied with their own thing they want to do and not quite as involved in the emotional stuff between the adults. You know. They kind of that kind of flies over their heads, and so kids who are more outgoing may show more interest in meeting the new people in the family adults and children. Then introverted children introverted children may come nearer seeing this as an intrusion in their peace.

Speaker 1: 7:14

So I understand it to be the case that boys sometimes will do worse in the divorce and separation but better in the stepfamily transition. Why do boys do better in the stepfamily transition than they do in the divorce?

Speaker 2: 7:31

My theory about that is that it has more to do with the fact that they appreciate having a maternal influence around, and many times the boys really miss their moms when they are not at home with mom. I even hear more boys telling me, especially in that up to 11 or 12 year old range, that they view mom as home. Not even about the house. Mom is home, and then the boys tend to be usually more receptive to stepmom relationship than the girls are.

Speaker 1: 8:10

Okay, and so then do girls have it reversed? Do girls do better in the divorce and have more difficulty in the stepfamily transition, or do they just have it tough on both sides?

Speaker 2: 8:22

more difficulty in the step-family transition or do they just have it tough on both sides? Could be tough on both sides, but I think they could do better with the divorce. They see themselves as pretty supportive of either parent and sometimes find a parent that they think needs their support or assistance more, but they tend to align more with one parent versus the other, but they tend to align more with one parent versus the other, and so I think they do then feel more threatened, position-wise or turf-wise with a stepmother especially. They tend to be kind of indifferent with a stepfather Right.

Speaker 1: 8:56

Okay, so the stepfather may have an easier transition? Yes, so long as he's not overbearing, right. But a stepmother, even just trying to be nice and laid back and interacting, can inadvertently take over some of the roles that the daughter was playing, and so even or she thought she was Right, exactly.

Speaker 2: 9:17

I've had many fathers say didn't really set foot in the kitchen, but now you think that was your territory and she's taking it over, Right?

Speaker 1: 9:26

So even a not overbearing stepmother could run into some difficulty in that transition with a daughter because of the perception the daughter has of what her role was in the household. Without an adult woman, right without an adult woman in the house.

Speaker 2: 9:39

It also varies a whole lot within each of those new stepfamily households. If both parents are recoupled that the children who are part-time residents versus full-time residents, or you may have some children that are full-time they never go to another parent's home Because even within the one let's say, father remarries a woman that has children with two exes one of those children may be there all the time. The other one may transition to a parent's home too while his children are transitioning in and out, and then they may have a child. That cements the relationship.

Speaker 1: 10:24

Right, and that was going to be the next thing I was going to ask you when the newly formed family unit, the parent and the sub-parent, have their own child, which is often referred to in the literature as the cement baby, what kind of transition is that now?

Speaker 2: 10:39

Right, it's really. I remember the times when they used to. You know, the first time family parents would try really hard after they were recoupled to get their children all on the same time frame, as far as you know, like the mom and stepdad would have their their kids, you know, going elsewhere the same weekend, so they would at least get their new couple time together every other weekend and same over here with dad and stepmom.

Speaker 1: 11:13

Sometimes that became way too complex to figure out Right, and they were trying to have, you know, a free kid free weekend every other weekend and have all the kids every other weekend.

Speaker 2: 11:24

Which is actually kind of I mean, I get it, I it's, it's kind of helpful, I think, really to that new couple bonding if you can make that happen. And the main thing to always be aware of is your it's hard to get, you're it's hard to get once again. Even in a very first relationship as a young person, it's hard not to romanticize overly. You know the situation and think, oh well, this isn't perfect, so I guess they're not right. You know, and so it's really important that you know that every person, even including the pets, you know, animals go through transitions too when we force them into new environments, and so it's very important to realize that everyone is doing their own job and role and transition within the family system with the new changes.

Speaker 1: 12:20

So bottom line is transitions are tough for kids all over. Separation has innately a ton of transitions that are difficult for kids. Adding in SEP relationships are transitions for kids that are difficult. That's why, in our Introducing a New Romantic Partner course, we ask that you consider not introducing a new romantic partner for a year after a divorce or separation, because your child needs that time to stabilize and to go through the grieving process before you introduce somebody. And having sooner introductions of romantic partners just increases the risk that you're going to have a rebound relationship and add a number of transitions that didn't need to be there at a time when kids don't need any more transition.

Speaker 1: 13:04

So, as we're talking about the rest of this section, talking about how the impact of kids, of trying to bring everything together and some of the challenges that kids have in forming these step family relationships, a lot of it is just going to be the case that transitions are tough and that's just the undercurrent of everything that we're going to be the case that transitions are tough and that's just the undercurrent of everything that we're going to be talking about here. Transitions are difficult and we're going to be talking about why it's difficult for the parents, why it's difficult for the kids. And then what can we do about it? If you want to learn more about how to introduce your romantic partners and if you want to learn more about how to have successful step families, I can check out our Co-Parent Academy website, where we have courses on both. Coincidentally, you can purchase them individually or in a bundle, which will allow you to save quite a bit of money. So thank you very much for joining us and we will talk to you next time.

Speaker 1: 14:09

All right, hope you enjoyed that replay of episode 42.