A writes:  My new husband and I have different ways of parenting.  He yells and rants for about twenty minutes at my 12-year-old, whereas I would basically tell her what she did wrong and punish her by taking her cell phone, ipod, computer and/or friends away for a certain length of time.  My feeling is that the step- parent should not be the disciplinarian of his or her new spouse’s children.  Everything should funnel through the biological parent.  Am I correct in my thinking?  Please help!

Chuck and Jae reply:  Relationships between children and step-parents take time to develop and mature.  A child will normally not willingly accept discipline from a non-biological parent until this relationship has developed in a healthy way over time.  It’s been our experience that things work out best if the biological parent has full responsibility for all of the discipline, at least during the early stages of the relationship.  With Jae’s children, I eventually learned (after some misguided beginnings) that I could serve both her and the children much better in the role of “consultant.”  There were times when I would privately suggest an approach that would work for Jae. Other times, the children would ask me for advice on how they could tell Jae something which they knew might be upsetting to her. 

The only times I would directly deal with her children on disciplinary issues would be when they did something that specifically involved me.  Examples included taking something of mine without permission, failing to show up when I had promised to pick them up somewhere, or being disrespectful to me, etc. Even in these cases, I would (respectfully) let them know how I felt about the matter and tell them that I would discuss it with their mother, who would decide on an appropriate consequence.

In any case, “yelling and ranting” are not healthy ways to deal with disciplinary issues in any family. This kind of behavior usually has adverse effects on a child’s self-esteem and often creates internalized anger that is acted out in negative ways. Furthermore, we don’t know of any parents who feel better about themselves after a bout of yelling. Many of them have reported, in retrospect, that they were probably mis-directing their anger at the children, when the real problem was related to something else in their lives.  Others simply lacked effective parenting skills.  A number of these parents declared that a few sessions of individual and family counseling were very helpful.