Search blended family quotes
When you find yourself wondering where to turn for a new idea, for a new approach, or for a whole new attitude, browse step family quotes for a refreshing look at how someone else feels about their blended family. There are many websites containing quotes about blended families that offer a fresh point of view or a word of encouragement.
Conflict in the blended family
Whenever you are in conflict with someone, there is one factor that can make the difference between damaging your relationship and deepening it. That factor is attitude. This observation by Timothy Bentley reminds that when we are struggling with step family relationships, we should be aware how fragile they can be. Indeed, attitudes control our lives. To paraphrase Tom Blandi, the secret power of your attitude is at work twenty-four hours a day, for good or for bad. It is important to learn how to harness and control its influence on others. Listening to your spouse or a step child, really listening, means that you must set aside any preconceptions you have about them or about the subject matter at hand. It means that if you see your step child as a problem, your spouse as wrong, yourself as right but unappreciated, or the situation at hand as unsolvable, chances are that these so-called truths will be the end result of your attempts to address conflict.
Communication the path to understanding
What we really need to know we often learn best from someone who has already survived the divorce-remarriage-blended family-step family struggles which we are now facing. Among the various books, articles, blogs, and websites written by step family veterans, across the board, all contributors stress the importance of good communication. Transparency, openness, and understanding are absolutely vital to healthy and effective communication, whether it is between blended family spouses, step parent and step child, step siblings, parent and ex-spouse, or with extended step family members. Read accounts of how others have approached blended family challenges, and re-read them again later on, to glean ideas you were not ready to understand the first time you read them. Words have a way of being understood only when the reader is ready for them. Keep at it!
Your blended family, like all families, will undergo its share of conflict, struggle, misunderstandings, arguments, crises, losses, and failures. Your blended family group can rise above all that and build loving step family relationships that nurture, comfort and sustain you all as a family with massive infusions of understanding, loving kindness, mutual respect, tolerance, and above all, patience. Hang in there! The effort is worth it the first time you hear a step child introduce you as My Other Mom or My Other Dad, or receive a spontaneous and heart-felt hug or thanks for the first time. Life can be very good for the blended family that learns to use all the tools available to help. Whether your inspiration comes from friends, books, or blended family quotes, run with it!