One common source of conflict for stepfamilies is dealing with parenting tasks. Step-couples often find themselves polarized when it comes to discipline. Each perceiving the other is either too strict or too permissive. Guidance is provided to help the couple parent as a team.
The Importance of Creating Holiday Traditions with Your Stepfamily
The holidays can be time when feelings of loss, differing expectations, and parental loyalty binds can all become heightened. However, the holidays can also be used to create traditions that promote cohesion and strength within a stepfamily.
How to Connect with Your Stepchild
Although building a new relationship with someone you care about can be an exciting and rewarding time, a step-parent’s experience can also feel painful and confusing.
Healthy Relationships: Are They Worth the Effort?
Do good relationships just happen? Is it simply a matter of the right chemistry? The truth is healthy relationships take effort to establish and maintain.
Caring for Someone with a Mood Disorder: How NOT to Go Crazy
Whether you have just found out or have known for several years, living with and loving someone who has mood disorder is difficult even in the best situation. In the course of any given day, you can feel hopeless, helpless, overwhelmed, confused, hurt, angry, frustrated, and/or resentful. If not dealt with, these feelings can lead to guilt, shame, sadness, exhaustion, fear, and isolation. Know that there isn’t a right or wrong way to feel. Learning how to handle negative emotions is what is most important.
Maintaining Family Traditions With Your College Student
Maintaining and growing new family traditions with children who are entering college can be a challenging situation for any family. College students are in the process of building their own lives and schedules and may not be able to as fully participate in family traditions as they have in the past.
Give Intangible Gifts for the Holidays
The holidays are the perfect time of the year for advertisers to target and attract us, the consumers, to spend lots of money buying “tangible” gifts—gifts that have a physical presence and can be touched. Many of these tangible gifts consist of expensive electronics, clothing, appliances, jewelry, and even cars. These are nice gifts to give and receive. But “intangible” gifts—gifts that have no physical presence and can’t be touched—can truly change the quality of your life and can be the best gifts you can ever give and receive.
Navigating the Challenges and Anxieties of Junior Year
Junior year of high school is a time of change and decision-making. High school is coming to an end, and teens must begin to make choices about what they will do after high school. Along with the stress of increased workloads and of making choices about future careers, teens must also manage the increased freedom that junior year brings.
Celebrating Down Syndrome Awareness Month
October is National Down Syndrome Awareness Month! It is a special time to spread awareness of this developmental disability. More importantly it is a time to celebrate the abilities and accomplishments of individuals with Down syndrome. This is a very important month for me personally because my younger sister has Down syndrome.
Four Ways to Talk to Your Kids About Ebola
The current Ebola outbreak is all over the media right now. It is an unfamiliar disease to the United States, and many people are fearful about Ebola spreading any further than it has. Even if you are not discussing it at home as a family, chances are your children are still hearing about it through conversations with their peers or around their schools. Children process information about a potential threat very differently than adults do.
