HW10: Handling Your Step/Blended Family

A step family is one where a single parent starts living with, or marries, an individual or another single parent. An individual can be in step families either as a step-parent or a biological parent. However, to be classified as step family, a family is normally expected to fulfill two conditions. First, one of the parents is not the biological parent of all the children, and second, the parents and children share a residence. Another definition of a step family is that it refers to a married couple living in the same house with at least one step child living together with them who is the biological or adopted child of one parent but not the other parent. A blended family is a subset of the step-family, and refers to families that include children who do not share the same natural parents.

As I search through the internet, I found an article entitled Blended Family? 5 Secrets of Step Parenting written by Carri and Gordon Taylor which discusses about ways on how to effectively handle or manage one's step family. These are as follows:

Defer to the Bio-Parent

This means that the step-parent should act as if he/she is the good one and make the biological parent as the bad one. Helping out and supporting the biological parent may help in forming fastly the relationship of step-child and the step-parent.

Don't Compete with Your Counterpart

The step-parent is usually in a difficult situation most especially with affection and authority with the child. In raising step children, these children may sometimes use the fact that their step parents are not their real parent during the heat of arguments. They may say that "You're not even my real mom/dad so why should I listen to you?". In times like this, it is better to let the real parent to make actions for his/her children, don't try to compete with him/her, and respect and acknowledge the strength of biological connection. Don't do such thing that would make a child accuse you of wanting to replace the biological parent.

Discover Your Stepchild's Interests

Try to discover some similarities between you and your step child. Try to find out things that you would both probably enjoy together. Act as his/her friend in order to build an appropriate and successful relationship.

Get Out of the Way

Let the children and his/her real parent to have a time together without you. Let them make things like going out for shopping, movies or picnics in order to make it sure that the kids still belong and won't feel as if they lost the love of their biological parent.

Act Lovingly Even If You Don't Like Your Step  kids
As a new member in the family, the step parent must act as if he/she likes or love the kids as his/her own even though he/she can't actually love or even like them in reality. By doing this properly, you will not know but love may eventually develop.

Being a step mom/dad is not an easy task. In order to avoid creating troubles, it is important to build trust and good relationship with step children as soon as possible. You can't expect children to have a positive attitude towards the formation of the step or blended family. But in time and patience, step parents may win the trust and respect of the step children which can result to happiness and harmony within the family.

HW9: Survey Report

As I mentioned in my previous posts, I had conducted an online survey but the result was unfortunately insufficient and somewhat unreliable. The online survey report shows that there are only 18 who responded on my survey which I thought would be more convenient for people to respond but it turn out to be useless. It also shows that, out of these 18 respondents, only one respondent comes from a step family, another one lives with his gay father and straight mother, one from a single father household, two from mother-headed households and the rest of the respondents are from two-parent families. The result would be more reliable and accurate if I just have a larger number of respondents.

As it was suggested by my professor, the types of family structures that I should include in my research paper should depend on the outcome of my survey in order to cover only those types with  gathered information. So based on the result, my research will only include discussions about the effects of single parent households (in general), gay and lesbians families and step and blended families on children's well-being in comparison with those children from two-parent families in measures of school outcomes and substance use and risk-taking behaviors such as smoking, drinking and drug use. This survey was not able to cover other measures of children’s well-being and only focused on these two measures. 

This shows the percentages of students from different family structures based on the total number of respondents (18). It appears that the largest portion constitutes students from two-parent families.

It can be interpreted from this graph that children from LGBT-parented families can perform as well as those children from non-disrupted two parent families while children from single parent and step families perform less than the first two.

Compared to children living in two-parent families, children in single-parent and stepparent families have greater substance use and risk-taking behavior, such as smoking and drinking alcoholic beverages.

The result of this survey supports my assumption that those children living diverse family structures such as single-parent families and step families are worse of across of measure of well-being (measures of school outcomes and substance use and risk-taking behavior like smoking, drinking and drug use) that those children with stable two-parent families or some children with gay or lesbian parents. But still, the scale of the differences among those children is not large and most children are not adversely affected. Compared to children living in two-parent families, children in single-parent and stepparent families have greater substance use and risk-taking behavior, such as smoking, drinking, and drug use.