GUEST BLOGGER: Kela Price, Founder of Blended Family Soap Opera
I love the show Supernanny with Jo Frost, the intuitive nanny who is much more than just a nanny. She literally brings families together by opening up lines of communication, teaching parents how to better understand their children and teaching couples how to work together. What I admire most is her “tell it like it is” approach. She’s very understanding and sweet, yet she doesn’t hesitate to put a parent in his or her place, especially when she feels as if his or her actions are negatively affecting the children.
This is often my message to clients when they reveal that their households are in total chaos due to the stepfamily obstacles that many remarried couples face. Anytime I sit down with an ex-wife who spends more time trying to develop a loving relationship with her ex-husband, but is fighting with her husband about discipline in the household; or a remarried dad who reveals that he feels obligated to fix his ex-wife’s kitchen sink, allow her to be intrusive or spend time with her and the kids because of the kids, I pose this question; “Is it more important and beneficial to your kids to show them what a healthy divorce or a healthy marriage looks like?” Their usual response is silence, followed by an “I get what you’re saying now.”
Is it more beneficial to your kids to show them what a healthy divorce or [what] a healthy marriage looks like?
Our society has been conditioned to believe that it’s better for children of divorce if we spend all of our time getting the divorced parents to live in harmony rather than developing and nurturing the remarriage. I’m not saying that it isn’t beneficial to the children to see the divorced parents being on the same page and working together to co-parent between two households, but getting them to love and live in harmony is an unrealistic expectation that shouldn’t be made priority over everything else. Divorced parents who are remarried shouldn’t spend the majority of their time trying to show their children what a healthy divorce looks like, but show them what a healthy marriage looks like.
In a society where 50% of first marriages and 67% of second marriages end in divorce, we need to do something different. More time needs to be spent on nurturing our marriages as opposed to nurturing our divorces. Our children need to see healthy examples of marriage, instead of putting all of the effort into showing them healthy examples of divorce. Remember, we want them to live happily ever after…marriage, not divorce! BFSO writer and counselor, Diane Greene often says that children live what they learn and this is so true. So, what are you teaching your children? Spending all of your time working on your divorce may make you feel better by ridding you of the guilt over divorcing in the first place, but in the long run, what are you teaching your children? Are you teaching them how to make a marriage work or how to make a divorce work? If so, which one do you think will be better for them in the future?
Kela Price is a Certified Stepfamily Counselor and the founder of www.blendedfamilysoapopera.com
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