The One Rule That Can Help You Be A Good Stepmom
Being a stepparent is hard, but knowing how to go about it doesn’t have to be.
So you’ve met someone special. After a while of getting to know them, you realize this just might be the love of your life. Your relationship grows and deepens and in time, you decide to take a big step and get married.
But speaking of “step...” before you came along, that love of your life was already a parent and now you have a stepchild. Hopefully you’ve already made an effort to build a relationship with them before you and your partner got married, but now that you are it all feels very official.
We’ll level with you: being a stepparent isn’t always easy, and it’s not for the faint of heart of the uncommitted. But while it can be complicated situation to situation, therapist and TikTok user Abby (@abbytherapist) wants to remind us that, really, there’s only one “rule” about being a stepmom.
“Let’s not overcomplicate it. Let’s not panic. There are a lot of things about being a stepparent that are challenging. And you probably didn’t expect it, and you’re figuring it out, but there is one rule. That rule is: the kid decides your relationship and the pace of your relationship. That is the only way to have a healthy relationship. You cannot force it. You cannot make them treat you as a mom if they don’t feel that you’re a mom.”
It might not feel natural to let a kid take the lead: after all, as adults we’re sort of trained to expect that we tell kids what to do. That they need to conform to our rules and, frankly, comfort. This isn’t always helped by the fact that some kids, in figuring out their new situation, don’t always make it easy on us. But, at the end of the day, we are the ones stepping into their lives, and we owe it to them to tread lightly and take our cues from them.
A stepparent/stepchild relationship can be a thing of real beauty. In some cases, that “step” prefix begins to feel like a technicality. But, as an adult, going into the relationship with a preconceived, inflexible notion of what that relationship is going to be is a recipe for disaster. It’s probably going to be somewhat different than what you’re picturing in your head.
But with an open mind, patience, understanding, and a thick skin, you can get there... if your stepchild wants to. And if that relationship winds up looking differently than you’d imagined, you can try to find the beauty in that, too.
