Understanding Losses of Stepchildren

Children are most vulnerable to hurt and scars caused by conflicts, separations or deaths of their parents and they feel the losses much more deeply than they can expresses. At such a time, even adults are so heart broken that they seldom realize what is going in the child�s mind and heart. While adults have maturity and coping skills to survive these bad times, children are much raw and have a much tender heart. Parental death or divorce often means that children lose all control over their lives and do not usually have say in any of the changes that they have to undergo during this transition phase. They lose contact with parents, grandparents and siblings and may have to undergo changes in living arrangements and routines. First, they have to adjust to a single-parent family and then to a stepfamily.

Losses to children may result from their helplessness and having no control over the situations they have to face. They may want their parents to divorce, move from their present residence, living arrangement in two households, stepping in of a stepparent which means that their parents will never reconcile, having to live with new stepsiblings and may be share a room with them, their changing role in the family, moving to a new school with new teachers and friends, moving to a new neighborhood, new activities, new family rules and traditions, may be financial pressures and perhaps new expectations from their parent and stepparent. These and many more changes can constitute great stress and sense of loss in children.

Understanding losses of stepchildren is very important for the couple and they need to realize that what they have seemed to gain from marriage might be a loss for their children. Children might become insecure due to remarriage and feel that their parent-child bond is threatened. They may not be trying to make you feel guilty and it must all be real to your stepchildren and so as a parent, you need to empathize with them. It may take your child to learn to share a parent with a stepparent or stepsiblings and to not view as a stepparent as a personal threat to their relationship with their parent. They may act jealous or manipulative but you have to know that they are just too much hurt and are trying to protect what they have and are afraid of losing their parent to you. This is the time when biological parent and children may need sometime together again and again while stepparent step away for awhile until the child is ready to accept you more and to share his or her parent with you.