mum
March 29, 2024

Recomposed families: how can the child find his place?

How to handle the negative attitude of your cherub? Should mom or dad feel guilty? Agnès de Viaris, a psychologist specializing in family issues, answers:

How will a child find his place between his mother and his father-in-law or his father and his mother-in-law? 

With time, the phase of recomposition confronts individual histories, divergences of sight, emotions, absent past for some, present for the others, the set of the expectations of each others. When direct links are observed between the different members of the family and that the step-parent and the child no longer pass by the parent to share is that a story has been woven between, around and for each of the members of the family. We are no longer in redial but in a family recomposed. One is not from the start a beautiful parent and a beautiful child, one becomes it.

How to avoid this famous phrase: "Are not you my father or mother?"

By not avoiding it because it is true! Take it as an opportunity. A beginning of dialogue. If he needs to express it, it's because a doubt has crept into him: he thinks the beautiful parent wants to replace the parent. It's wrong. We have one father and one mother. This does not prevent the step-parent from existing as a beautiful parent. This is the beginning of a development necessary for everyone to take the right place in the new family organization.

Everyone arrives in the family with his life story and you have to get to know each other.
This time is incompressible. An invisible past for the step-parent is nevertheless present for the child. One of the difficulties of this news family is that it builds itself above the psychological legacy of the families preceding. In a recomposition, everything is about understanding and just distance. The ability to challenge yourself to adapt, to be flexible and open-minded in a scholarly relational alchemy to define.

You feel guilty! You want to overprotect this wounded child but he feels your guilt and benefits. How to react ?

It is essential to preserve the child by respecting the other parent and not criticizing him. When a parent puts his or her relationship problems back on the children, he or she does not realize the destabilizing consequences he or she is subjected to. The child may become unknowingly the one who feeds the fight of his parents. The child becomes the intermediary link that must allow the relationship to always exist. Even in the conflict. In this world of emotional blackmail, the child is taken hostage while what he seeks is to be reassured.

The parent is often afraid of being less loved by his children if he does not defend them in a conflict. He is often caught between two fires: his children and his new spouse. For children, as the handsome parent takes a place they find threatening to the parent, they tend to take an offensive stance. If the parent leaves them in doubt and emotional insecurity, children can even become oppressive, investing space to leave no room for the "stranger", the one who invades the field. In their eyes, it is he who is responsible for the chaos.

This idea can also be relegated by the ex. The latter can even give a smooth, perfect exterior appearance and distilling with children a not always flattering picture of the couple recomposed. In these extreme cases, children mobilize their energy to come to an end, against the handsome parent, instead of staying in their place as children. Some develop imaginative treasures ranging from manipulation to emotional blackmail and seize every opportunity to act. They need so much reassurance that they are convinced of the need to make the parent react with this type of method.

Being afraid of losing the affection of his children whom he sees less often, he is tempted by a conciliatory attitude and has a tendency to give in to the immediate pleasure of the child. Of course, far from being a good solution, this attitude can give the illusion to the children to have a full power on the situation. Some, taking advantage of the parent's guilt to inflict a painful situation that they are forced to undergo, will exert emotional blackmail. They will then be in a position of strength to impose their "will" against the "non-power" of the beautiful parent.In this way the child can develop a tyrannical attitude which he will have a hard time getting rid of if he is not put in his child's place. It all depends on the involvement of the parent in his role during this critical period.

When the child judges, gets angry with the mother or the dad, what is the best position to adopt: must he reply, get angry too, punish him, give him ??

Whenever he expresses himself, it is an opportunity for the parent to see where his suffering, his difficulty lies, and to help him understand and overcome it. You are here for that! Every negative attitude of these is a call to the parent's attention. The child needs to be reassured during the phase of instability that is the recomposition. His aggressiveness and his emotions will have to be channeled thanks to the support that surrounds him.

It's your role as a parent in this school of life which is the new home. Learn to welcome this "Other", another than yourself, the Stranger. Develop empathy. It all depends on the state of mind that the adults of the recomposition implement. But it is possible. Some families succeed. The recomposition can be experienced as a learning situation from the relationship to the other, this stranger, entered our personal life intimacy, into our family. It is then a shared experience where we learn together, big and small. A common history where conflicts are expressed and overcome together. It thus offers constructive perspectives to the child. Recomposition then becomes a lever, a useful experience, a school of life.



Dr. Phil on blended families (March 2024)