Lhe extended family is a growing model. Separations and divorces, in fact, are creating millions of new families “in the second round”with the consequent genesis of stepmothers, stepfathers, half-brothers, half-sisters. The use of the derogatory term, which has survived from fairy tales, is however absolutely unmotivated. Today the rules of the game have changed and it’s time to take note of it.
Extended family: a book talks about it
The bonds that arise with people that are “acquired” when a parent starts a new life can be intense and beautiful, but they can also create conflicts and misunderstandings. For this reason, the Doctor Samantha Vitalipsychologist and psychotherapistmother and stepmother for over seventeen years, who herself grew up in an extended family, decided to write “Life as a Stepmother” (Sperling & Kupfer), an instruction manual on how to survive the challenges of the extended familydesigned to help everyone involved.
On the stepmother’s side
«Since I became a stepmother, 17 years ago, I have never come across a narrative supporting this figure. I felt it was necessary to take action, giving the most truthful explanation possible of what it is the universe of emotions and feelings that are experienced by becoming “parents” in the second row of children who are not their own. I think it’s time to find out what it feels like on that side. The stepmother is culturally “the other”, the villain par excellence. In the extended family it is important to understand that even if a choice does not concern us personally, because it is made by someone else, its consequences will still have an impact on our family life, and most of the time this fact is as true as it is difficult to accept” , explains the author.
The importance of rules
«Each of us has its rules, which reflect the way he was raised. There are those who give importance to the way of eating at the table, those who more or less observe religious occasions, those who take off their shoes before entering the house and so on. This set of knowledge and ways of living will be taught and passed down to your children through behavioral patterns specific to each family context. Within the same culture, therefore, some methods will be very similar from family to family, but others on the contrary will be very different. This explains the fatic, in broader contexts, to allow two or more traditions to coexist in the growth and education of children. In total good faith, therefore, one can find oneself as a stepmother dictating rules of behavior that are taken for granted for usonly to find out that they are not at all for the other family», warns Doctor Vitali.
Find a compromise
«The difficulty in making different rules coexist, trying to respect them all, is really not a simple thing, especially if we are not the parent, but the stepmother or stepfather. In these cases a solid alliance is needed between the two new partnerswhich they will have to talk to your children trying to mediate as much as possibleand explaining that they will have to deal with customs that are different from those they were used to, but with those new provisions they can be adapted little by littlealways supported by parents, with flexibility and gradualness”, suggests the author.
Changing language
“Our society considers the end of marriage “wrong”. and for this reason it coins horrible nicknames to give to All what comes “after”, a reflection of a stigma that continues to persist despite changes. We all have them in mind mispronunciations of the names of new figures within the extended familybut perhaps we have never really focused on their origins, nor above all on the consequences that such unpleasant nicknames can cause on a perceptive level on new and future relationships between the various components of the nucleus. To the suffixes -astri and -igne only the -acci are missing to complete this competition between villains, to which the protagonists of the “extended version” family are forced. Victims of the “happily ever after”, we need to get out of the sense of guilt and overcome the fear of what to do with the children, our own and that of the new partner, with the ex, with the grandparents who are multiplying, with weekends, houses, schedules, holidays, Christmas and Easter and finding solutions and ways out of seemingly dead ends”, concludes Doctor Vitali.
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