12. Special Families
A great number of children today are being brought up by adults other than the ones who brought them into the world. I refer mainly to families in which parents have divorced, one or both parents have died, parents have never married, or parents can no longer take care of the children for whatever reason. An increasing number of children are also being brought up by same-sex couples, mostly women. When new families are created for these children, they are called step-, adopted-, or foster families. I call these reconstituted families blended families. When a family is not reconstituted, it is a one-parent family.
If you are in the process of building a blended family or developing a one-parent family, give yourself permission to know that it can be first-rate. Your family can become a wonderful place to be. All the possibilities and techniques exist to make it so. Think of the things you need to do as challenges, then become an enthusiastic detective and experimenter.
Families are more alike than they are different. All the factors I have presented so far——self-esteem, communication, and adults as family architects——apply to blended and one-parent families as well. While these families have additional aspects that sometimes make them seem different, other considerations are mere variations. All family forms can be first-rate, given the congruence and creativeness of the adults in charge.
The one-parent family offers special challenges. These families are presently of three sorts: one parent has left and the remaining parent does not remarry; a single person legally adopts a child; or an unmarried woman keeps a child. One-parent families, regardless of origin, are most commonly a female parent and her children. The challenge is, how can a family that includes only one adult be growth—producing for the children and the adult? Here we can see the effect of ghosts and shadows from the past. To form healthy families, the resentments and grief need to be put in place. In part this entails exploring why this is a one-parent family.
A big problem in the one-parent family is the presentation of a whole picture about males and females. It is easy for the remaining parent to give negative messages about the departed one, particularly if the departure was due to divorce, desertion, or something that caused great pain. A woman who remains with the children will have to work hard not to give them messages about the “badness” of the male. A male child who hears this will find it hard to believe that maleness is good. If he can’t feel that maleness is good, how can he feel that he is good?
The female may be handicapped by having a skewed picture of what males are like. This is also a foundation for unhappiness with males later on. Meanwhile, it is all too easy for a mother to pull an older son into the role of husband, thus blurring his own role as son with his mother and his role as sibling with brothers and sisters.
In a growing number of families, fathers are the sole parent. Fathers who feel unable to handle all the needs of their children may bring in a housekeeper to help with the chores and supervision. Does the housekeeper then care for these children’s intimacy needs? Much depends on the personality of the housekeeper, the attitude of the father, and the kids themselves. The situation is anything but easy; it takes great patience and understanding on everybody’s part.
Finally, since children in a one-parent family do not experience an ongoing male-and-female relationship, they grow up without a full model of what that is like. This may be a factor in same-sex parenting as well.
These problems are not insurmountable. It is quite possible for a woman to have a healthy, accepting attitude toward males and be mature enough so that she does not have to give her children negative messages about males. She can be willing to provide and encourage relationships between children and adult males she knows and admires. These might be her own parents; they might be husbands of friends; they could be her own male friends. As far as putting one child on the spot by asking him to be a co- leader with her in the family, she can manage this by explaining the difference between competence at a given task and changing a full-time role. For instance, it is natural that if you are seventeen, you know more about putting up screen windows and are tall enough to do the job than if you were ten years old. Putting up screen windows or following through on any other job with which your mother needs help doesn’t mean you also have to take on the role of coleader with your mother on a full-time basis.
Boys in a one-parent family probably face the greatest trap: being overmothered, and/ or getting the picture that females dominate society, ending up with the feeling that the male is nothing. Very often the male’s feeling of needing to nurture his mother’s helplessness puts him into a position where he cannot himself take up his own independent life. Many boys react to this by remaining with their mothers and just not acting on their own heterosexual interests; or they rebel and leave home, feeling that women are enemies. They then alternately mistreat and worship women, all too often messing up the rest of their lives. A one-parent family is basically incomplete as far as live-in models are concerned. Adults who know this can do things to make completeness possible. This might even consist of periodically having children go to live with a loved and trusted family——a kind of informal foster-home arrangement.
The female child in a one-parent family also can get distorted learning about what male-female relationships are like. Her attitudes about being female can range all the way from being a servant——giving everything and receiving nothing——to feeling she has to do everything herself and be completely independent.
Now, let’s turn to the blended family. Much is said and written about preparing people for marriage who have never been married before. Indeed, I have done so in this book. But I feel that perhaps this kind of preparation is even more important for people who have been married before and are now making another try——this time, with children. All blended families start out with great handicaps. I think that if these handicaps are understood, they can be overcome and used productively.
Blended families have certain things in common. They put together parts of previously existing families. There are basically three forms:
- A woman with children who marries a man without children.
- A man with children who marries a woman without children.
- Both the woman and the man have children by previous partners.
In the first case, the blended family consists of the wife, the wife’s children, husband, and wife’s ex-husband. In the second case, the unit is husband, husband’s children, wife, and husband’s ex-wife. In the third case, the family consists of wife, wife’s children, wife’s ex-husband, husband, husband’s children, and the husband’s ex-wife.
Even though these people may or may not (and probably don’t) all live under one roof, they are in each other’s lives, for better or worse. Room has to be made for all of them. Each member is significant to the growth and success of the blended family. Many people in the blended families try to live as though other members didn’t exist.
All of these people have authority in one way or another. Problems arise when they do not find time to talk openly with one another, are in disagreement, or, in some cases, are avowed enemies.
Picture the child who has a mother and stepfather in the home, and a father and stepmother living in another home; all four of these adults are taking some responsibility for him or her. Can you imagine what it would be like for that child to live in an atmosphere in which each adult is in some way asking something different, especially if the adults are unaware of this? Or if they are not on speaking terms with one another?
What is a child supposed to do with two conflicting directions? (At times there may be as many different instructions as there are parents.) For the child’s sake, two things are necessary. First, the child needs to be encouraged by all concerned to tell what opposing directions have been given. Second, the adults need to have periodic meetings with the child or children so they can discover what each adult is doing and how they agree or disagree. The chances are that if the respective adults are open about what they are doing, the child can at least choose and won’t have to be a secret- keeper for the adults——a problem that often arises be- tween divorced parents who still regard one another as enemies and use their children as spies.
I remember a sixteen-year-old girl who was acting alternately crazy and depressed. It developed that she lived with her mother and stepfather, spent one weekend with her father and his fiancee, the next weekend with her mother and her new husband, and the third weekend with her maternal grandparents. Adults in each place asked her to tell what went on in the other places; they also made her promise not to tell what went on “here.” The sad part was that all these adults really liked the girl and wanted to help her, but they inadvertently put the burden on her for their jealousy, rivalries, and resentments toward one another.
This same thing can go on in a natural family, with a husband and wife, if they can’t be straight with each other. They unwittingly ask the child to deal with what they can’t deal with themselves. Of course, the child cannot possibly do this in any constructive way, so the child often responds by becoming sick, bad, crazy, stupid, or all of these things.
Needless to say, in the session where I gathered everyone together with the sixteen-year-old girl, we had a few stormy hours until all the truth got put on the table. Headway was then made so the girl no longer had to be crazy or depressed. This didn’t happen overnight, for she slowly had to learn to trust again.
A child benefits when all the adults around can be open with one another and take responsibility for what they think and feel. To be open with someone doesn’t mean you have to love that person. Former marital partners cannot always be expected to continue loving one another, but they can be open and not foist their problems with each other on the child. This is probably the most crucial problem that challenges the blended family: to keep the child free of the adults’ burdens.
The fact that a family is blended does not in and of itself deter developing a good family life. I have seen people develop blended families of all varieties very successfully. To do so, they need to be aware of many potential handicaps and deal with them in a loving, realistic, congruent manner. Again, the process that goes on between people determines what happens in families.
Let’s examine some of the problems in detail. For a divorced person who makes a new marriage, the experience of divorce itself was probably painful. Having to have a divorce involves disappointment, and the potential for developing mistrust is very much there, too. In a way, the second spouse has a harder row to hoe than the first one. There is often a subtle message that, “You need to be better than the one before you.” People who remarry after divorce have been burned once, and they don’t forget easily.
This is why it is so important for divorced individuals to work out for themselves the meaning of their respective divorces, understand it, and use whatever they discover to teach themselves something. This is greatly preferable to bemoaning their fate or carrying grudges or suffering extreme disappointment.
The woman with children who remarries is often inclined to treat her children as though they were her private property. This introduces a handicap for her new mate at the very beginning. She often believes that she does not want to impose on her new husband, feeling perhaps that he would not understand her children or the particular process she has with them. Sometimes she feels a misplaced loyalty to her former husband. Any or all of these modes add up to the fact that her new husband doesn’t have a well-defined role as a helper. It also ignores the possibility that a man coming into a family has new perspectives and new ways of doing things that might be integrated in the new family.
One trap is that the woman may feel so much in need of a “father’s firm hand” that she expects him to exert a power and an influence he has not had the chance to develop with her children. This is a pretty big order, particularly if she feels the children are out of hand. New husbands may be inclined to try to fulfill their wives’ expectations and wishes, often doing a poor job of it. They may be the new head of the family but, as it is with new leaders in business or elsewhere, they have to feel their way into a new situation. If a new husband takes charge prematurely, he may be in for unnecessary trouble from the children. This is usually true with teenagers in particular.
Including a stepparent can be rocky in other ways. The natural parent and the children have spent years together, and things like in-jokes or family buzzwords can make a stepparent feel left out. Almost every family develops some kinds of rituals or traditions or specific ways of doing things. These customs have to be recognized and understood by everybody, or they can be a real source of trouble.
One of my suggestions when working with people who are preparing for a blended family life is that they constantly keep in mind that each had a life before and much of what goes on in the present life will have a reference point in the past. If one hears something and doesn’t understand, freely asking questions is the way out. Many stepparents, rather than asking, handle the situation by thinking, “Well, maybe that’s none of my business,” or, “I shouldn’t ask about it,” or “Maybe I’m not supposed to know about it,” or acting as though they do. This kind of message to oneself frequently gets translated directly into low self-esteem. Another frequent rationale is, “If she wanted me to know, she would have told me.”
Another facet to this situation has to do with previous possessions, friends, and contacts that unintentionally impinge on the present marriage. Among these, of course, are the in-laws or grandparents and other relatives of the people who divorced. There are very few divorces in which the relatives don’t have opinions (and oftentimes too much to say) about what did happen, what could have happened, or what should have happened. We need to take all these things into account. It is important that everybody is clear about what has happened and straight about his or her way of communicating it. Sounds easy. I know it is not. Nonetheless, we can’t fall off the face of the earth, or destroy or get away
from all that we had yesterday. We need to include and integrate the things that belong to yesterday.
So far I have been talking about a spouse who has been divorced and remarried, and some of the strains and difficulties he or she faces. I’d like to remind you that the new spouse, too, had a previous life; and when he or she also has children, the same kinds of problems are possible. If the new husband’s children live apart from him, he may spend more time with his stepchildren than his own kids, just by virtue of proximity. Frequently this makes for discomfort on his part; he may feel he is neglecting his own kids. Having his children come visit him in his new home can create a problem for his ex-wife, the children’s mother, in that she shares parenting with another woman.
To do a successful job, adults who remarry must revamp their parenting styles. They need to parent their own children and their spouse’s children without neglecting or cheating either. It is easy to see how complicated the blended family situation is. If both divorced parents and both remarried parents are mature, they can work things out together so that all their children gain instead of lose.
First, it is important to remember that the adults got married, divorced, or remarried. The children are either willing or unwilling followers. They need to be allowed to keep a place for their original parents, and be helped to find a way to add another parent. This takes time and patience, especially at first. I can hardly emphasize this point too strongly. The stepparent is a stranger, whom the child may even see as an interloper. This has little or nothing to do with innate goodness or lovableness.
For the moment, let yourself look through the eyes of the child who is part of the blended family. The child’s questions will be, “How will I treat my new parent? What shall I call my new parent? How will my new parent feel about me and my relationship to my other parent?”
Perhaps the single most serious problem faced by a child in a blended family is that the child may not feel free to love whomever he or she wants to love. Loving the missing parent might get the child into trouble. Children in blended families need to be convinced they have that freedom.
Many adults want to preserve the value of the divorced parent in the eyes of their children. This can be tough. If you are the mother, what do you say to your children about your ex-spouse, an alcoholic who beat you and starved you during a marriage of many years? Now you’re with a man who no longer does these things. Can you help your children value their father and, at the same time, help them receive the new man without sending out the message that the first one was no good? You can, if you separate the value of the self from the behavior.
Sometimes when the other parent has been sent to jail or a mental hospital, or has had a long history of irresponsibility——in any case, conditions that might make for a feeling of shame——the remaining parent tries to live as though the other person didn’t exist. From where I sit, in the hundreds of cases I have seen, any time a child is asked to ignore and/ or denounce either biological parent, she or he runs a great risk of developing low self-worth. How can you say, “I am good” if you feel you came from bad stock?
I certainly am not advising parents to say everything is good about a parent, whether or not it is true. That isn’t the point. The important thing is to guide children to the awareness that people are made up of many parts, and that relationships sometimes bring two parts together that don’t mesh well. Having such a part doesn’t make someone a bad person. Nor does having problems make it a bad relationship: sometimes we know how to change things, to continue nurturing ourselves and each other; sometimes we don’t know how to change things.
I have never found a human being who was all bad. For instance, a person whose partner has been violent toward him or her can gain something by seeing that the partner lashed out because of low self-esteem. Although an interaction between the two of them probably seemed to trigger the violence, the issue goes beyond blame, into communication and congruence.
Friction of any degree can remind us to relax. As a step-parent in a blended family, you can take it easy and not push. For the time being, you may be an interloper and a stranger in the child’s life. Give yourself a chance, too.
Make room in your own mind for your stepchild’s other parent. That person may live elsewhere, yet she or he is also a presence with your stepchild. You can’t wish away the biological parent. Offer plenty of opportunities to let the child know that you are not trying to replace that parent. No one says you have to love automatically. You can, however, give the child the status of a human being, and leave room for trust and love to grow.
Important questions are: In what ways will the current spouse plan with the ex-spouse in relation to the child’s welfare? How do you want to include the ex-spouse in the current family?
This brings us to the questions of visitation and support——difficult issues, particularly when minor children are involved. Answers depend almost completely on how each of the divorced partners has come to terms with the divorce. If strain still permeates the relationship, these questions are anything but easy to handle.
Shadows from the past are very real and must be dealt with by the new marital pair. The children are not exactly
out of these shadows, either. They may have been part of the old hurts; they often take sides. Their loyalties are torn. Frequently they are not living with the parent whose side they took. Their problems don’t necessarily disappear simply because there has been a change in parents.
Bringing together children who do not know each other and who do not feel sure of their places can put tremendous strain on the marriage. These children do not necessarily reflect the joy of the new spouses. There are also blended families containing “your children,” “my children,” and “our children.” This situation only increases the potential for problems, and the process for coping is just the same: the question is not whether there will be strains, but what are they going to be and how will they be coped with? This is a great creative challenge to the new marital team.
Time, patience, and the ability to stand not being loved (at least for a time) are terribly important. What reason is there, after all, for a child to automatically love the step-parent, any more than there is for the stepparent to love the child automatically?
One approach that has helped many families deal with this is that the new husband and wife are quite clear that their family faces big handicaps, and that they can be straight with each other and with the children. They don’t ask the children to be phony with them; everyone is free to be honest. Again, this doesn’t come easily. Few of us have learned how to be emotionally honest. We need to be patient with ourselves while we struggle with our learning.
As with adults, life after marriage for children is very different than it was during the courtship. Surprises abound. Life with Mama’s boyfriend or Papa’s girlfriend is just not the same when it comes to forging a family unit.
I remember a ten-year-old boy whose father and mother had divorced when he was five. His mother remarried when he was eight. About a year after the second marriage, the boy suddenly asked his mother, “Hey, Ma. Whatever happened to Harold?” Harold was a man who had come over fairly frequently for a period of time between the two marriages and stayed the night at his mother’s home.
The stepfather immediately demanded, “Who’s Harold?” Mother blushed and told her son to go to his room. He went and then overheard their quarrel. The husband essentially accused the wife of keeping things from him and ended up by calling her a slut, liar, and so on.
Apparently she had created a situation in which her second husband thought she had told him everything. It just so happened that Harold wasn’t included in what she had told him. Her son’s question had been innocent enough, but its effect was an unpleasant surprise.
Something else happens when the previous marriage has been particularly hurtful, especially as far as the mother is concerned. She may begin to see her children as symbols of that hurt. Every time she gets into any kind of negative thing with the children, it brings back memories of the hurtful times and all her fears about their terrible effects on her children.
I know one woman, married the second time, who went through this. Every time her four-year-old son said “no,” she had visions of her husband. He had rebelled his whole life; eventually he went to prison for assaulting someone. So when her young son said “no” to her, her image was of a person already in prison, and she beat him unmercifully to keep him from becoming a criminal. This is a clear illustration of how this woman’s attitude created more problems. Her expectations of this child and what his “no” meant belonged to her past, not to what was presently going on with her son.
Children have a lot of work to do to be clear about a father who is now married to another woman with whom he has other children. When things aren’t straight between the children and their father, the situation can make for low-pot feelings, questions, jealousies, and so on. I have the impression that many of the children get deprived of their remarried fathers more than is necessary because these fathers and their second families aren't prepared to, nor do they really know how to, integrate previous children into the family.
How the current husband and wife got together has a great deal to do with how things go on in the present. Suppose they both were previously married, met each other while still married, carried on a courtship, divorced their respective mates, and made a new marriage of their own. Unless some very, very good and careful work has gone on, the previous spouses can easily sway the feelings of the children against acknowledging this new relationship.
The children’s ages have a good deal to do with the difficulties inherited in a second marriage. If the children are young——perhaps under the ages of two or three——the possibilities for interference from the past life are not as great as for older children. If the children are grown, the new marriage may become irrelevant to them: it is a matter for the new marital partners to feel good about. When family matters involve children in money, property, business, or so forth, it is important to arrive at mutually acceptable agreements. I have known cases where older children fought the idea of new marriages by their parents because of the trouble they expected about money.
For purposes of bringing home some of these points about new partners and children in blended families, let’s examine another hypothetical family. Jennifer and Jim are thirty-three and thirty-five years old, respectively. After ten years of marriage, they divorce. Three years later Jennifer meets Dave, with whom she feels she can make a better marriage. After a year-long courtship, she marries him.
Jim and Jennifer have three children. At the time of Jennifer’s remarriage, Tom is twelve; Diana, ten; and Bill, eight. Jim has moved to a new town about two hundred miles away. According to the divorce settlement, Jim was to see his children once a month; but because he started a new business, he didn’t always get there that often. He was, however, continuing to pay alimony and child support.
Before Jennifer’s second marriage, she and the kids lived with her parents. Because Jennifer had to work, more and more of the parenting was turned over to her mother and father. Jennifer’s job involved a lot of travel; in fact, it was on one of her trips that she met Dave. Much of the time she and Dave were together was time not shared with her three children. Dave had met them but only for short times. There had been nice feelings between him and the children, but in no way could Dave feel he really knew them.
Dave, by the way, had also been married before and had a daughter, Theresa, age twelve; she lived with her mother in a city some seven hundred miles away. His divorce agreement allowed him to have Theresa stay with him for summer vacations. Generally speaking, there was a good relationship between Theresa and her father.
After Jennifer and Dave married, Jennifer naturally wanted to set up a home for the children, which meant taking them away from Grandmother and Grandfather. Very much in love and without thinking too much about it, Jennifer and Dave just assumed they were going to be able to reconstitute the family very easily.
Let’s consider some of the things that might have helped develop this blended family. First of all, there needs to be a clear recognition on everybody’s part that when Jennifer’s three children group together with their mother and her new husband, this will be a completely new family unit. Even though Jim doesn’t visit very often, he does pay child support, and he too is part of the picture.
The question comes up immediately: What role will Dave have with the children? His role name is stepfather. But what does that really mean? Ordinarily a wife hopes her husband will participate with her in bringing up her children. And she may, without realizing it, assume that because her husband loves her and she loves him, he will know certain facts pertaining to the children.
Stepfathers rarely know these facts, though, and therefore should not expect to come into the lives of the children and be helpful immediately. Far too many stepparents expect this of themselves. Dave is a stranger, and he will be a stranger to Jennifer’s children for some time. Jim’s shadow is still very much there, and to some extent always will be.
Sometimes people feel their self-worth rests on how much change can be made right away. What we actually need when we come into a new situation is time——all the time that is necessary in any situation to become fully acquainted.
Back to Jennifer and Dave. What happened in the previous marriage between Jennifer and Jim may not have been totally acceptable to the children, which could form a barrier to their acceptance of their stepfather. Suppose the children perceive very subtle messages that they must be on their mother’s side against their father, and they must take her new husband as their father. Jennifer may still be feeling much pain, bitterness, and disappointment——a legacy from her first marriage. Many women feel this way and expect their children to feel the same. Jennifer could say, with a very determined or blank look when Jim calls or writes for them to visit, “Well, it’s your decision. You do it if you want to.” Or, the message can be anything but subtle: “If you go to your father, just don’t have anything more to do with me!” Subtle or direct, Jennifer or anyone else in her place is asking for trouble by expecting her children to reflect her own feelings about her first husband.
The legacy of pain from a first marriage is a source of trouble of another kind as well. People’s expectations for a second marriage can be monumental——close, sometimes, to expecting Nirvana. Many adults in blended families expect magic. Because they got rid of the troubling spouse and now have a better one, “all the problems are solved.” They forget that people will still relate to people, that there will still be the arsenic hour (the time when demands are far greater than any one person can meet), and the same kinds of things will go on, such as people being sassy with one another, or flip, angry, or stubborn.
It really comes down to the fact that people are people and will act like people whether in a natural family or in a blended one. For example, I remember a woman who had remarried when her oldest child was eleven. At fourteen he began giving his mother a lot of static. Her immediate conclusion was that it had been wrong for her to remarry; that if she hadn’t remarried, her son wouldn’t be the way he was. Certainly the communication that had gone on between her and the boy in relation to the stepfather had something to do with the situation, but so did the boy’s experimenting with his mother, and his feeling on the outside of things. This could have occurred in a family where there was not a second marriage or a stepfather.
In short, anybody entering into marriage expects life to be better, and a second marriage is no exception. And further, it seems that the more you want out of life, the more you expect, and the greater your anticipation, the greater can be the disappointments.
Another variation of a blended family is when two people make a second marriage after one or both of the first spouses have died. There are different kinds of traps here.
Suppose a woman was married fifteen years and her husband died. Relatively soon afterward she met a man who had never been married. Let us say that her first husband died a tragic, accidental death. Their marriage was fair: not too exciting, on the dull side. But the impact of his death crowded out any memory of the boredom and dullness of that marriage and left this woman with an exaggerated feeling of how good the marriage had been. Then she marries a man who could provide for her, whom she cares about, and who may be more exciting than her former husband. But at times, when she feels disappointed or annoyed with her present husband, she could put into words how much better life had been with her former husband, leaving it open for the second husband to be compared unfavorably with him. Of course the same thing could happen with a man who marries again after his wife died.
I take the view that people are not angels, and every relationship has its difficulties. Because of our peculiar attitude toward death, we tend to elevate the departed one to the status of saint. And this is unreal. No human being can compete with a saint.
It is important for both the husband and wife to accept the fact that somebody did live before, was a person in her or his own right, and had a place. That place should be acknowledged. For instance, I know of several people who married again after their spouses died. The new spouse insisted that no pictures or belongings of the former man be allowed, almost as if he were asking his mate to rid herself of even the memory of him. Again, this is a low-pot response. It is almost as if the person is saying, “If you still acknowledge your first marriage, then you can’t possibly acknowledge the second.” I consider this a rather emotionally underdeveloped attitude. In short, nonsense!
Kids can have problems when adults either don’t mention the person who has died or else deify him. It’s pretty hard, if not impossible, for a child to relate to a ghost or a saint.
Another trap is when the new spouse is sensitive to comments about how things used to be. I’ve known some people who have come into families in which a spouse has died and who really wanted to and were willing to do everything they could, but upset the whole household by asking the family to behave quite differently from the way they were accustomed to. If such a person were to build bridges to the children and in a gradual way make room for new things, I think things would be much different. Again, one’s self-esteem does not depend on how much change one can effect right away.
The foster family is another form of a blended family. It may include one foster child and no other children; one foster child and some “natural” children; or one natural child and several foster children. The composition of the family makes a difference in the kinds of handicaps to be overcome.
The foster child’s former situation is also a factor. Generally speaking, a child becomes a foster child when, for whatever reason, his or her own parents can’t be the caretakers. This may be because the child’s behavior is such that the people in the family cannot stand to continue living with the child. Or a person in authority might decide the family system is harmful to the child, who would have a safer life in another family. Frequently the parents have been seriously neglectful——parents whose behavior was so punitive, punishing, or hurtful that somebody removed the child from the home.
Almost all foster children are placed in foster homes by reason of a court order, which brings another element into the picture, namely, the court. So the management of the child is now not only between the foster parents and the real parents, but also the court.
Sometimes both parents have died, leaving the child with no home. Relatives or guardians don’t want to put the child in an orphanage, so they look for a foster family. For some reason the child may not be adoptable, which means the child will have no permanent status in the foster family. The child may live in a foster home a long time, taken in, in a sense. as a boarder.
In other instances, a child’s sole parent has had to go to a mental hospital or jail. As far as the child was concerned, everything was fine up until the time this parent was taken away (let's say the other parent is dead or divorced). Now this child needs to live until his or her parent returns. This kind of placement is relatively temporary.
All these situations imply a message about the kind of a place the child will have in his foster family. The message answers the question in the minds of the foster family members: “How come you can’t stay in your own family?” There is also a message about the message. This is what I mean: If the foster parents take a child who has been acting up at home, they might see their task as being super strict to prevent the child from acting up again. If the child comes because the parents have been abusive, the foster parents would probably feel sorry for her or him and bend over backward to be super loving. There is nothing like abusive parents to arouse the anger and protectiveness of foster parents. The trap here is that the foster parents might give the child negative messages about his or her own parents, in effect damaging the child’s chances for developing an integrated self-concept. I can hardly express this thought too often: No one can feel high self-worth who feels she or he came from devils and bad people.
If the child has no living parents, foster parents have the job of feeling good about giving their all with someone who, after all, is not their child. On the other hand, foster parents are often wary of getting themselves too involved because, on the face of it, the child is with them only temporarily. (Foster placements range from overnight to twenty-one years.) One thing is certain: the child who comes into the foster home is having something done to him or her for his or her own good, and there is usually a strong message that somehow the child’s own parents failed in some way. Whether this “bad seed” psychology becomes a real handicap to the child depends a great deal on the emotional stability and development of the foster parents. If they can see themselves as offering not only time, but a bridge for this child toward some new growth, and they can freely involve themselves in a true family, parent-child manner, their foster family has a good chance to be successful and produce a well-balanced human being with good self-esteem.
Very often the child’s natural parents are allowed visit ing privileges or some kind of contact while the child is in the foster home. Whether or not the natural parents can become an integrated part of the child’s ongoing life and participate in the child’s growth depends on how the foster parents view the natural parents. In some ways this situation is not too different from integrating the divorced parent into a child’s life. I have known some foster families who were revolted by what they learned about the behavior of the child’s real parents and who found it very hard to treat the natural parents with any kind of acceptance when they visited.
So how can foster parents treat the child’s natural parents as okay people if they know, for example, that the child has been badly beaten or burned by them? It is obviously destructive and irrational for an adult to burn or beat a child. Again, being aware that this behavior comes from a person who has a terribly low sense of self can help you be more understanding and not just ready to damn the parents. I wish that for every foster child placed, there were someone to help the natural parents grow and improve so that they could again become responsible, loving people who could do a good job of parenting. So often, if this happens at all, it comes about through the foster parents. I once saw a beautiful example of this. A pair of foster parents saw the parents of their three foster children as people who needed to grow. As opportunities presented themselves, they acted as parents to these parents in such a way as to help the natural parents grow, learn, change, and ultimately feel like okay people.
I want to say a word or two about another kind of family. This is the communal family, which has seen many variations over the years. In general, and for various reasons, a group of adults who have children live together either in the same building or the same complex. They share tasks and maybe even common property. They also share parent- ing among the many children; some of the adults even share sexual lives.
An advantage to this kind of family is that the child gets exposed to a variety of models. The one big problem, of course, is that a very good relationship must exist among all of the adults so that the mutual parenting can really offer something.
Israel’s kibbutzim are one kind of communal living; but the major parenting goes on with an auxiliary parent, a woman. Biological parents are treated very much as visitors in that they don’t participate fully in the decision-making.
They might have very little to do with the day-to-day living experience.
Families with live-in governesses or nurses are often informal kinds of foster families. Some of the same problems of distance are created between the child and the actual parents as we have been discussing in this chapter.
Many children have had a great variety of experiences in blended families. Through the course of life, a child may have belonged to a step-family, a one-parent, adoptive, and/or foster family. It’s possible for a child, between birth and maturity, to have had fathering done by five different males. Suppose the child’s biological father dies or leaves, and the child then spends time with a grandparent. The mother remarries, and a stepfather appears. It’s possible that the stepfather may die, or perhaps the mother remarries, and the child has another stepfather. It is equally possible that the child has some kind of difficulty and goes to a foster home until coming of age. This kind of thing happens frequently. The same is true, although to a lesser extent, for the person who fills the mother slot. Many children have had a number of different adults filling the role of mother.
One thread runs through all of these family variations: the adults are trying to lend their resources to help children grow. Simultaneously, they are trying to manage their own growth——and in some way that will be compatible with their children’s development. All of the things I mentioned that happen in the variations of the foster families I’ve described can also happen in natural families. Husbands and wives can be jealous of each other, children can feel left out or jealous of their sisters or brothers; they can all have experiences that make them feel isolated from other members of the family and feel low-pot.
The point is that the family’s form is not the basic determinant of what happens in the family. Form presents different kinds of challenges to be met, but the process that goes on among the family members is what, in the end, determines how well the family gets along together; how well the adults grow, separately and with one another; and how well the children develop into creative, healthy human beings. For this, self-worth, communication, rules, and the system are the chief means of making a family work.
In this way, all families are alike.