Blended families offer unique challenges, blessings for LDS families
The Hill family stands for a portrait at their home in Orem on Friday, March 22, 2013. From left, Cameran Mulford, Seth Hill, Jeff Hill, Tammy Hill, Maddy Mulford, and Amanda Hill. JAMES ROH/Daily Herald
Amanda Hill, right, plays piano with her stepsister, Maddy Mulford, at their home in Orem on Friday, March 22, 2013. JAMES ROH/Daily Herald
Tammy Mulford Hill sat on the couch with her stepson, Seth. The two were reminiscing, remembering good times and telling stories.
Hill told Seth about the day one of her children was born. She recounted the details of the day, the hospital and the excitement of bringing home a baby. Then Hill stopped to think.
“Seth, I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t remember the day you were born. I don’t know why — I just don’t remember.”
Then she understood. “Oh, that’s right!” she said. “I didn’t give birth to you!”
Hill’s mistake shows just how far she and her husband have come in their marriage. She and E. Jeffrey Hill were married after they were both widowed, bringing together two large and well-established families to form the Hill-Mulford family. They have been married 6½ years.
“We’ve gotten to the point where we feel like family,” said Jeffrey Hill, who is an associate professor in the School of Family Life at Brigham Young University. “As we’ve been together, we’ve started to look more alike and take on each other’s mannerisms. People will say Seth looks just like Tammy, even though they’re not related.”
The Hill-Mulfords have attained what every family in their situation strives for. Their blended family is their family. But it takes a lot of work and commitment to get to that point.
Making the transition
When a parent remarries after divorce or the death of a spouse, there are tender emotions involved for everyone in the family. Integrating a new parent and, in some cases, new siblings into the home is stressful. But there are a few things families can do to ease the transition.
“If you’re just embarking on a blending relationship, it’s important to find neutral ground,” Jeffrey said. “It’s best not to move into his home or her home, but to move to a new place.” This creates a setting in which neither family is at an advantage. “Be conscious,” he said. “Don’t privilege either of the first families.”
In some cases, these conscious efforts include deciding how family members will refer to each other and determining what the family name will be. “I assumed that we’d be the Hill family,” Jeffrey said. “We learned after a while that we were the Hill-Mulford family, and Hill only comes first because it is alphabetical.”
Other challenges come when families view the blended family as the cause for disharmony in the home.
“Children in most families will have their times of disappointment, rebellion, sibling rivalries and so on,” said Dr. Janet Scharman, Student Life vice president at BYU, who has a blended family and has written extensively on the subject. “It can be easy to blame those challenges on being in a blended family rather than acknowledging that they are part of the developmental process that most families — first and blended — commonly experience.”
Forming relationships
Building positive emotional connections in a blended family takes time — a lot of time. Jeffrey said that if a blended family begins to feel cohesive in four years, its members have blended quickly. Seven years is common. Some families need even more time. But building positive relationships is the key to success.
In blended families, a strong husband-wife relationship is perhaps even more essential to harmony in the home than in first marriages. Especially in cases of divorce, it’s natural for children to want their first family to reunite. Building a strong connection between husband and wife can help.
“I think that it’s really important to have a good, solid marital relationship and take care of that marriage,” Jeffrey said. “It’s important that the parents don’t argue or become angry with each other in front of the children. Show them that you support each other, love each other and are kind to each other. That reduces the ‘Parent Trap’ syndrome.”
Relationships between stepparents and stepchildren can be more difficult to nurture, but they are just as important to the success of the family.
“Steprelationships — as with all relationships — take time,” Scharman said. “Unless children are very young at the time of a remarriage, stepparents who are most successful first develop friendships that can develop into closer and more intimate relationships over time.”
This can be established through one-on-one time, family activities and taking opportunities — like Tammy Hill did — to sit down and talk to stepchildren. As those relationships are established, the entire family unit is strengthened.
Jeffrey Hill has found that a stepparent can significantly improve his relationship with stepchildren by staying out of disciplinary situations. Instead, he says, it’s best to leave it to your spouse.
“The discipline should always flow from the biological parent,” he says. “One of the ways that stepparents get in trouble more than anything is when the stepparent tries to discipline. That’s a really explosive situation.”
Finally, relationships with extended family members — especially grandparents — are especially important to nurture.
“This is a big deal,” said Brent Scharman, Janet’s husband and a recently retired psychologist with LDS Family Services. Brent and Jan are the parents of a blended family of 10 children in their remarriage of 24 years.
“Grandparents usually have little or no input into the decision to divorce and remarry, yet those decisions significantly affect their lives,” Brent Scharman said. “They need time to work through feelings and let new relationships unfold. It may take longer than their biological child thinks it ought to take.”
Spiritual questions
Blended families who belong to the LDS Church often have unique challenges. The church strongly encourages the development of strong nuclear families, and when that is disrupted, it can be disconcerting.
“Divorce may be harder to accept in the LDS community because of our strong pro-family feelings,” Brent Scharman said. “On the other hand, LDS people try very hard to make all go well when remarriage takes place. Sometimes they may try too hard and want feelings to develop too quickly. Ultimately, the same process that makes relationships strong in nuclear families is what works in stepfamilies.”
The LDS Church teaches that families have the potential to be eternal when the marriage is performed by proper authority, or sealed, in the temple. But due to the nature of blended families, stepchildren may be sealed to someone outside their blended family. Maybe they are sealed to a deceased parent, or maybe they wonder what the state of their divorced family will be in the afterlife.
“It does feel awkward,” Jeffrey Hill said. “My natural tendency is to feel like this is an eternal love that we have, so it is awkward to think about. I choose not to think about it too much but to remember that God is good, and no matter how things work out, it will be something we love.”
Robert E. Wells, emeritus member of the LDS Church’s First Quorum of Seventy, wrote on this topic in the August 1997 issue of the Ensign magazine.
“Family members need not worry about the sealing situation of blended families as it might be in the next life,” Wells wrote. “Our concern is to live the gospel now and to love others, especially those in our family. If we live the gospel to the best of our ability, the Lord in His love and mercy will bless us in the next life and all things will be right.”
What successful blended families do
There is no one right way to blend two families into one, but there are some things most successful families do. Honoring the past while looking to the future is an important balance to strike.
“Keeping at least some of the important traditions from the first family as well as beginning new traditions with the blended family helps children feel included and creates some stability in a world that has changed dramatically for them,” Janet Scharman said.
The experiences that individuals face before a family is ever blended — divorce, death or single life — make each person who they are, which contribute to the richness of a family and the complexity of life.
“We’ve had two different lives,” Jeffrey Hill said. “We had our lives before our spouses died, and we have a life now that’s very different. But we also love it. It makes us more complete people because we’ve had these varieties of experiences.”