Better Than Blended DevotionalSample

Dealing with Conflict

Parenting within a blended family is much different than in a traditional family. In a blended family, besides dealing with the ordinary challenges of growing up, our children also have to contend with additional external influences. Added to the vast changes that already exist in trying to become a blended family, children of blended families experience many situations due to outside influences that can affect their attitude within the family. This has the potential to generate a great deal of conflict in the home.

Some of the influences outside the home may include the other parents, their relatives, friends, and acquaintances from earlier in their lives. Any of these relationships can have a major impact on our children’s efforts to integrate into our blended family. Besides these outside influences, a child’s age, gender, and stage of life also have a great deal to do with how he or she adjusts to life in our home and can also contribute to the potential for family conflict.

Once we establish who is influencing our children, we must become aware of what we want our children’s experience in our home to look like and then set boundaries that allows us to set an atmosphere within our home that guards that experience.

Think about it!

What boundaries have you established to appropriately protect the experience in your home? What boundaries might you need to set?