Rules and Discipline in a Stepfamily
>> Monday, October 19, 2009
How do you keep the peace in your house? How do you set rules and enforce rules if the other household doesn't do the same thing? Or worse yet, if they openly sabotage your efforts to maintain some type of consistency and peace in your house?
We dealt with that last question for so many years! It was chaos in our house every other weekend, alternating holidays and part of the summer. So stressful! What was REALLY frustrating was knowing it didn't have to be that way.
I wish we'd had a family guide book that each household HAD to follow or face the judge's wrath. Yeah right, judge's wrath. That's funny. Maybe in a world where the courts aren't biased would that happen. It was very difficult when we had rules and consequences and the other house criticized, ignored, or openly antagonized the situation.
That has been one advantage to a long-distance type schedule. Those times are now fewer with much more "calm" within our own family home now. It's been great not having to worry about the cussing and my own kids getting hurt on a weekly basis anymore (and not having to deal with the ex on a weekly basis either). I do miss them, but I don't miss the constant chaos.
2 comments:
The best thing we have found to do is just reinforce to the kids that we actually have rules at our house (unlike elsewhere) and remind them what our expectations are. I am a strong believer that our home is OUR home, and a parent who doesn't want to step up and be a responsible parent is not going to manipulate the rules of our home.
That was our belief as well but it made for a lot of grounding in our house because my ss thought he could do whatever he wanted because he had his mom teaching him that. What made it worse was I did a lot of the grounding because hubby worked Saturdays so that was the cherry on top of the ex's "make our lives hell" cake. I couldn't wait eight hours for hubby to get home after his son would hit a sibling, etc. I became the evil, mean one because I disciplined...the ex made sure to encourage and fertilize that thought with my stepson until there was no chance of a relationship between him and I.
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