Beyond the Brady Bunch
Hope & Help for the Step Family

You know you’re in a step family when you hit that invisible wall and find yourself related to people you don’t know, referring to children that you didn’t give birth to as “your’ children, and spending energy making financial ends stretch to meet growing obligations. In this new family your time is no longer your own, and you’re dancing around calendar dates to make everyone happy, feeling like a stranger in your own home, and don’t know how to play by the rules anymore. Sometimes it seems like the reality of being in a step family is being stepped on!

Before becoming the modern-day Brady Bunch, we had high hopes. Yes, the Brady’s were fiction and blended families are not quite as perky in real life. The merging of two families, two histories, and many lives is an ongoing and difficult process. In today’s reality TV version there would be tears, threats, misunderstandings, and a whole lot of messy loose ends—and there would certainly be no budget for Alice! And, though life in a step family can not be reduced to a few simple steps, there are certain things that helped us go beyond the Brady’s:

• Remain flexible and allow God to shape you in the areas that are hardest. Be the adult and allow the children to be children.


• Be committed to growing your marriage and developing couple strength. Make adult decisions behind closed doors, allowing the biological parent to be the enforcer of the rules for their children.


• Respect the biological bond and the other parents connected to that bond.


• Give children boundaries to help them grow. Give them understanding to help them learn, and give them a voice to help them learn their value.


• Recognize that things might not change over night, but encourage and applaud positive changes as they occur. This is a slow process of learning to know and love other people that are now “your new family.”
• Remember that “fair” is in the eye of the beholder and don’t get discouraged when what you think is fair, is not accepted as such.


• Become a person of prayer—asking God for help and hope.
  
  

Becoming a step family has led us to hope in a power bigger than ourselves, because on the flip side of the pain, we have experienced God’s grace, love and forgiveness.  We like to call our family a blended family, because God has taken two different families and blended us by His love.  The road has been hard, especially at first, but by the grace of God, and the love of Jesus Christ, every blended family can become an opportunity to see His redeeming and restoring love at work.

—Ray and Debbie Alsdorf are the authors of Beyond the Brady Bunch, lay counselors within their local church and the founders of Design4Living Ministries. Debbie is the author of several women’s books, including The Faith Dare, and the Design4Living Bible Study Series.