How Do I Know If My Blended Family Needs Counseling or If We Just Need More Time? A Minneapolis Parent's Guide
Normal Adjustment vs. a Stuck Pattern: The Real Question to Ask
This is the misconception that most Minneapolis blended families fall into. That stress automatically means that the family is damaged. Well, the friction is to be expected. The inquiry is not “we’re having problems?” but rather “are we at a standstill?”
The period of adjusting is usually quite ragged in nature. Stepchildren pushing the boundaries of their stepparent. The biological parent caught in the middle. Bedtime procedures that contradict in the two homes. These are just the pains of development and these are going to gradually change. You will find that you will be getting little achievements. Perhaps the stepparent and your child are finally talking to each other at dinnertime. Or maybe the handoffs for co-parenting get less and less awkward every month. Blended family therapists agree that it could take blended families two to five years before they establish a rhythm of living together. So that’s a really long while to be in discomfort, but it does not always indicate you have to go see a therapist for it.
The situation is quite different in the event that a pattern that you’re in has become stuck.
If you are having the identical conflict on Sunday evenings and nobody has moved an inch of their position in six months, you are in a standstill. If one of the children is refusing to talk to the stepparent and the biological parent has ceased to be involved with the situation, you are in a standstill. And, of course, if you and your spouse are shying away from any number of subjects because every time one of you bring it up it’s going to be just like all the times that followed, well, that is a pattern you probably can’t break all by yourself.
Signs You’re in a Stuck Pattern
We run across these issues time and again during family therapy sessions, and they can easily go unnoticed if you are experiencing one of these issues in your home each and every day.
- The identical dispute keeps going off at weekly intervals with nothing new to say or anyone taking a step forward.
- One, or more members of the family, are just not emotionally invested in the home anymore.
- A child’s conduct in school or at home is becoming increasingly worse instead of getting better with time over a number of months.
- You and your partner have different ideas about parenting but you have stopped talking about it.
- One of the family members has begun keeping a score card of how fairly children in different families are being treated.
Any individual one of the issues above can certainly be short-term and fleeting. However, if two to three of them are true about your household right now and it has been true for longer than a few months, time alone is not likely to solve the problem.
What “Just Needing More Time” Looks Like
Families who are developing in an everyday manner still have plenty of bad days. What sets them apart is direction. Imagine it as being stuck in Uptown traffic for the evening. It’s a sluggish progress and you’re aggravated but it’s still going. This kind of stuck pattern would more be similar to looping a block in the vicinity of Bde Maka Ska and being completely clueless as to where you will park your car. You have movement but it is not really any type of progress.
When a family is doing an ordinary, healthy adjustment, there are usually at least several things that have improved in some way since the blended family was put together. It is a little easier to talk. Children complain but they are participating. You and your partner are still able to get on one another’s nerves without the relationship being put on the line. And if something does not work out, you are still able to discuss it a day or two after the event without it festering.
But this is the thing that we have discovered from assisting blended families in our Minneapolis office. Usually it’s been going on a while before you get here. You tell yourself, “this is normal, it’ll get better, I just need to give it more time.” It’s often been a year or more by the time you seek blended family counseling, which is one way that the work becomes harder than it needed to be.
You don’t need to be in a crisis to seek support. If you’re reading this and wondering whether your family is adjusting or stuck, it’s worth exploring this with a therapist who is familiar with blended family dynamics.
How Long Does it Take for a Blended Family to Adjust?
Most of the families we serve in Minneapolis come to counseling in the first few months of moving in together. It’s really difficult, it’s really painful, and it’s very common to want to measure how long you’ve been trying.
The experts estimate that the adjustment period for a blended family takes about 5 to 7 years. For most people, that is shocking to hear. And it was shocking for us to read.
We don’t mean that you’re going to be miserable for 7 years. It means that deep level of trust that biological families have with one another doesn’t develop overnight or in a couple of years. There are stages within that time, and most of them will go a lot easier than where you’re at now.
The First Couple of Years
The first one to two years will be the most difficult.
Everyone’s getting their bearings and figuring out what their roles will be within the new family. Your children may be struggling with whether the stepparent is an ally or a threat to the family unit. Your partner’s children may be testing each and every boundary you set. You’re second guessing your decision to have moved in together.
Often we work with families in neighborhoods such as Linden Hills or Northeast Minneapolis. The two separate families function well separately, but as one family, it’s incredibly difficult. Bedtime routines no longer work. Both parents are parenting in drastically different ways. Your children feel like there’s no place for them in the blended family unit.
This level of chaos is normal and expected.
Am I on Track or Stuck?
Time alone won’t heal anything; time merely passes.
So, the real question isn’t, “how long have I been married to this person?” The question is really, “Is there any evidence of forward movement?” Here’s what to look for:
- Occasional moments between the stepparent and stepchild where the child feels connected with the stepparent
- Conflicts between family members do occur, but the family is able to resolve the problem more quickly today than they could three months ago
- Children are able to identify at least one thing they like about being in a blended family
- You and your spouse are still able to disagree on a parenting decision without this leading to a larger fight about the state of your relationship
If none of the above are true in a family where they’ve lived together for six to twelve months, this is a sign. It doesn’t necessarily mean your family is doomed. It does mean that whatever patterns your family has fallen into won’t change on their own.
One family we worked with, who have lived together for close to two years, kept insisting to us, “it just takes more time.” But what the stepparent didn’t realize was that he hadn’t eaten a single one of those dinners with the kids in months. And that 10-year-old had been having meltdowns every single Sunday night, as the week of school began. More time was not going to help, as the dynamics were going in a loop.
And that’s where the line is drawn between a family slowly moving through an adjustment period and a family that’s going to need blended family counseling. Adjustment takes time. Families that are stuck stay stuck in the same fights, the same silences, the same Sunday-night meltdowns.
And here’s one thing I don’t think we talk about a lot enough. If one (or more) of the family members also has ADHD or is on the autism spectrum, their adjustment process can be very different. Sensory needs, executive function challenges, and different social communication styles can all make the regular bumps and bruises of blending a family seem far more extreme. None of those are behavior issues that require correction. They’re differences in how a brain is wired that need to be acknowledged and accommodated in the blended family plan.
So give yourselves the grace of the timeline. But don’t let your need for more time stop you from getting help when it’s clear something isn’t changing.
Three Very Common Blended Family Situations and What Each One Is Telling You
The challenges of blended families aren’t always the same. And when families come into my counseling practice in Minneapolis, I can usually categorize the situations I’m seeing into one of several groups. Sometimes it helps to know where a family fits into a list like this one to help them understand whether they are in an expected part of the process, or if they are stuck somewhere else, and whether they need professional help to un-stick them.
Situation #1: The Silent Standoff
Everyone is very polite. Nobody’s screaming or yelling, or anything like that. But your stepchild refuses to make any eye contact with you, your partner is walking on eggshells, and the whole dinner table feels like a hostage situation, where everyone is thinking what they’re thinking but nobody wants to say it out loud.
This scenario is pretty common for the first couple of years of a blended family’s existence. Everyone is just watching to see if this new arrangement is going to be a safe one. If this standoff has been going on for a bit longer, like six months or so, it might just be that this family needs a little more time and a little more chance to slowly begin to establish small bits of trust between them. But if you’re looking at a year or more into the new arrangement and nothing has changed at all, there’s a chance that that silence may be starting to become a wall between you all, rather than a pause before the kids say hello, and it will be important for a family therapist to help everyone get that communication flowing again before that wall hardens completely.
Situation #2: The Ongoing Battle of the Wills
This one can be pretty loud. A stepparent will try to lay down some kind of a new rule, the kids will push back on it, the parents will find themselves trying to decide which side to be on. Is that rule about how much time you’re allowed on the phone or the computer? Is that rule which parent’s house the kids are going to stay at on which nights of the week? I see this often when a couple is sharing kids who live in different areas, say one parent lives in Uptown and another lives in Roseville.
There’s certainly going to be some amount of power struggles involved in any blended family relationship at the beginning, as the two new parties learn to figure out what the rules for this new family unit will look like. But, again, if this particular pattern keeps happening over and over again, with nothing to resolve the conflicts, and if your partner and yourself can’t get together as a couple to come to agreement on the new set of house rules, regardless of the children’s input at that moment, then it’s probably a sign that the adults need a little help figuring out a new set of rules to try that’s going to work for everyone. In these instances, counseling a blended family can often begin as counseling for the couple, first, because kids can’t really settle comfortably into a household structure if the couple aren’t able to agree upon the structure themselves.
Situation #3: Only One Child in a Family Is Having Difficulty
This one is the sneakiest. 3 out of 4 children are adjusting just fine. The other child is struggling a little, getting poor grades, becoming more distant, or causing behavioral issues at school. We might be tempted to dismiss this as a “phase.” Sometimes it is a phase. However, when a child who previously did just fine isn’t so fine after a family transition, their behavior is communicating something. The children might not have the words for how they feel. Mental health specialists in pediatrics indicate that children in blended families may need one or two years to adjust. However, if the problematic behaviors persist beyond that time period, a mental health professional might be of help. In cases like this, child therapy might be in addition to family therapy. The child would receive some space just for themselves while the family tackles things together on a larger scale. And as we say to many of our families, this doesn’t mean that you have failed. It means you are a blended family. Because blended families have extra variables that other families might not have, it makes sense that some extra attention might be needed in certain instances to help the family pieces fit together. If you see your family in any of these scenarios and things have been like that for months now, that’s good information to know because it’s telling you that waiting it out isn’t likely to lead to improvement.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long should we wait before considering blended family counseling?
There isn’t a set number of months we recommend you wait, however if you’ve found yourself with the same situation for six months or longer without change, you may be doing more waiting and no more improvement. Look for change, not just months passed.
Is it normal for a stepchild to be resistant to spending time with their stepparent?
Some resistance in the first year is typical. But if after a year or more the children are still avoiding a relationship and nothing is being done about that, bring this up to a family therapist.
Can we do blended family counseling with just the parents and not the kids?
Yes. Sometimes therapists will work with the adults to get everyone on the same page as parents first before bringing the children to the sessions. It can be helpful for adults to align first before including children.
What if one child in the family seems like they are having difficulty, but not the others?
That’s also very common and still worth addressing. A child might receive individual therapy as they navigate, with family therapy sessions every so often, rather than waiting to see if the child “grows out” of the behavior.
Does it matter that our family also has a diagnosis of ADHD or autism?
Yes. Those issues might make “normal” step family behavior seem more extreme. Finding a therapist who is skilled in blended families and is also educated about neurodivergence may be an option for you in building a plan to help your unique family.
Where can we find blended family counseling in Minneapolis?
Find a mental health professional who specializes in stepfamily counseling, not just family or child counseling or couple counseling. Many family therapists offer a free initial call to chat over what it might look like to work with them before you book a session.
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