3 Things Great Step-Parents Know

# 3. What you don’t say matters

Photo by Artem Labunsky on Unsplash

When you fall in love with someone who already has kids there are a whole different set of challenges to negotiate.

We often think step parenting begins once you get married, but it actually starts the minute you meet your partner’s child. How you deal with and build that relationship from the start makes a huge impact long-term.

Step-parenting, especially if you don’t already have your own kids, is not easy! We get it wrong; we make mistakes; we feel frustrated, confused, lost and annoyed. There are no perfect cookie-cutter answers to “How to Step-Parent” just as there aren’t easy answers for how to parent. We learn along the way, and thankfully we’re not the first or only ones to go through this experience. We can learn from the many experts and experienced step-parents out there, so that the mistakes we make are smaller.

Here are three basic guidelines for being a great step-parent:

1. Boundaries — It’s not the same as being a birth parent

Know you’re not the child’s birth parent and don’t try to be. My own stepmom wrote me a beautiful card once saying, “I’m won’t try to replace your mom. No-one can replace her.” It was an incredibly important thing for me (a…