This week we talked about divorce and blended families. This topic was interesting to me because of how little exposure I have had to such things. We looked over the processes, predictors, and protectors from divorce. There are emotional, legal, economic, co-parental, community,and psychic processes involved in divorce. The two adults involved must go through "trust falls", division of property, division of friends and family, and they make up their minds to be divorced. Some of the predictors for people to get a divorce is that sometimes, the parents of the divorcees were divorced and the child now sees divorce as an option. Also, the child of divorced parents usually hasn't seen what a healthy relationship looks like. This leaves them with little example to go on other than that of their own parents' bad relationship. Children are likely to recreate patterns that they have seen from their own parents. Cohabitation is another predictor of divorce. Cohabitation leads to the idea that there is always a way out of a bad relationship and once you are married, divorce becomes the only way out.
I found it interesting that 70% of couples who divorced found that two years later, they felt that they could have saved the relationship and wished that they had saved the marriage.
Blended families are a tricky thing. Most often, it takes about two years until the family reaches normalcy. Even if the children involved are young. A good suggestion for the new parent is to let the biological parent do the heavy discipline and the step-parent should take on more of an aunt/uncle role. This would be them being loving to the children but giving light corrections. This gives the biological parent peace of mind and it helps to ease the transition of having a new authority figure in the household.
