Meeting my children was so intimidating for my partner
Once you hit your 40s, it’s not the parents you need to impress in relationships, but the young ones, says Genevieve Roberts
During my teenage years, in the pre-mobile phone era, any boy wanting to ask me out had to pluck up the courage to phone our landline and navigate an awkward conversation with my mum before getting to speak to me. It was a great barrier; I’m tempted to get one installed myself before my children go to secondary school.
But for my friends who are back on the dating scene – it happens often when their children go to primary school – there’s a far more daunting approval process: in your forties, meeting the children becomes the new meeting the parents.
One in three families in the UK are blended (I’m researching the subject for a new book), and we’re an overlooked minority: unless there’s a politician or celebrity involved we rarely hear about modern families with step- and halfrelatives, co-parents and donors.
When my husband Mark first met Astrid, now seven, and Xavi, five, three years ago, I thought very hard about my children’s feelings. It’s only now when I hear other parents’ experiences that I realise how intimidating it must have felt for Mark, too.
My friend “Louise” (she asked me to change her name) said her children defined her dates. “A major consideration was: ‘What will the kids think of this person?’ I wanted to meet someone caring and loving. It was really important the kids gave their blessing.”
I felt similarly when I met Mark: the children were my absolute priority. We were friends first and I remember him telling me he’d always imagined that if he had a daughter, he’d call her Astrid.
By the time Louise met her partner’s children and he met hers, both adults felt they knew the children’s personalities somewhat from extensive conversations and videos. It was still intimidating. “I was worried whether they’d like me. Also, whether I’d find them rude,” she admits. They started with short meet-ups, keeping the focus on fun, before building up to sleepovers and all the children meeting.
Professor Lisa Doodson, founder of Happy Steps, which offers blended family support, says a slow pace helps children. “As they’re not the ones choosing the relationship, they might feel guilt towards the other parent, if there is one, and won’t necessarily know how to express it,” she explains.
“It’s dangerous to put pressure on children for their acceptance. Instead, share your confidence in this relationship and reassure them they will never be sidelined.
“Affection will grow in time, but there always needs to be one-to-one time with the biological parent.”
Louise lives in Kent while her partner is in west London; they don’t plan to live together, which she believes has helped her children welcome the relationship. “We have our family time and blended family time. Living together would add pressure, especially with children changing schools,” she says.
Patricia Papernow, author of Surviving and Thriving in Stepfamily Relationships, has spent decades researching blended families and says the term often captures a wish more than a reality.
“Children are attached to their parents and will often turn to them, rather than a step-parent,” she explains. “This means the parent is constantly turning away from the step-parent by just looking out for their children. They are stuck inside, often feeling anxious, because they can’t please everyone. Step-parents are stuck outside, often feeling lonely or inadequate.”
Papernow says there’s no blueprint for step-families, comparing it with navigating a city with a map for somewhere else.
“Worldwide, step-parents want more structure and limits, while parents want more love and understanding,” she explains. This can become polarised with a stepparent becoming more demanding and the biological parent protective.
“Kids need authoritative limits from parents: connection with boundaries. Step-parents should lead with connection, not correction. The challenge is how to talk to your partner – because I don’t know a parent who isn’t defensive about their parenting.”
So can step-parents move into that more authoritative, lovingwith-boundaries parental role? Papernow suggests it’s only possible when a secure base is established, over years rather than months, but adds that it’s significantly less likely to happen with older children.
“If the kids are young – aged eight and under – it’s more likely,” she says. “Boys tend to be easier than girls; teens are really hard and teen girls have the hardest time. Show curiosity in their interests, whether that’s video games, sports, music.”
However, she says, a step-parent relationship doesn’t need deep intimacy to contribute to a child’s wellbeing: if step-parents lead with warmth, rather than discipline, it can lift the child’s self-esteem.
I think of our family. I ask Mark, who didn’t have children in his previous relationship, if he remembers meeting Astrid and Xavi. “I wasn’t nervous; just really naive,” he tells me. “They were wonderful; I couldn’t understand why other parents always talked about the negatives of parenting.”
Did he have any concerns? “I knew a dad role is a lot of responsibility, but thought we were right together. I thought sleep would be harder than it turned out to be.
“Then, during our first autumn together, I shared the film of The Jungle Book with Astrid, which felt like I was offering her something you weren’t, and when they let me start reading them stories I felt they were accepting me.”