Blended families are common. Here are tips to help stepsiblings get along
The Science of Siblings is a new series exploring the ways our siblings can influence us, from our money and our mental health all the way down to our very molecules. We’ll be sharing these stories over the next several weeks.
Stepsiblings get a distorted rap in popular culture. On the one hand, you’ve got Cinderella and her evil stepsisters. On the other, there’s The Brady Bunch, where six stepsiblings get along almost ridiculously well.
“The Brady Bunch did not help us when it comes to what to do in stepfamilies. It really didn’t,” says Caroline Sanner, an assistant professor of family science at Virginia Tech who studies stepfamily relationships.
Sanner and other researchers say that since The Brady Bunch aired in the 1970s, they’ve learned a lot about what works and what doesn’t work to help stepsiblings get along. And while some of their advice might seem obvious, the rest might surprise you. Here are a few of their research-backed tips.
Take things slowly
“Becoming a stepfamily is a process. It is not an event. It takes time,” says Patricia Papernow, a psychologist who has written three books about blended families and spent ily research.
Papernow says when new couples fall in love, they can get wrapped up in the excitement. “They want to form a family,” she says, “and oftentimes they charge ahead.” But she says that can be too much change, too fast for the children from their prior unions.
“One of the dilemmas is that as the rate of change goes up, kids’ well-being goes down. Kids need to go much more slowly,” Papernow says.
Lisa Garrard and Kirsten Brandt James say their parents went the opposite of slowly when they fell in love in the early 1970s. Lisa’s dad and Kirsten’s mom were both widowed, with three children each (not unlike the Brady Bunch family). They started dating one summer when Kirsten’s mom took her girls to visit family back in Texas. Within two short months, they were married.
“I was shocked,” says Kirsten. For her, the marriage meant a move from her home in California to Texas, a new house with new stepsiblings and a new school.
Despite that whirlwind start to their stepfamily, Lisa and Kirsten both agree that, some 50 years later, all six stepsiblings are as close as can be. They Zoom weekly to catch up.
And that lifelong bonding may have something to do with the fact that their parents did a lot of other things right.
Create new family rituals
Research has shown that it’s important for parents to create new family rituals that encourage everyone in the stepfamily to bond. Kirsten and Lisa’s parents took that seriously.
“We had to go to church on Sunday as a family. We [went] on vacation as a family. We’re eating as a family. It was very family-oriented,” Lisa says.
For Lisa and Kirsten’s family, most of this happened after their parents’ marriage. But Sanner says ideally, the biological parents can start creating opportunities for their respective children to bond while they are still in the dating phase – once they are relatively sure that their new partner is going to stick around, of course. She says it’s best to start off with low-stakes opportunities for the kids to get to know each other, like ice skating or going to the park together. That way, they can discover shared interests they might have – whether it’s music or sports or video games – why Laotian girls are beautiful without the pressure of already being stepsiblings.
