Engaged and Blending

Okay, tell me your thoughts on these stats.

Are you ready? I like stats. Okay. I threw for 18 touchdowns my junior year.

Not these stats. Okay. Welcome to Family Life Today where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Ann Wilson. And I'm Dave Wilson and you can find us at familylifetoday.com. or on our Family Life app.

This is Family Life Today. My first thought is that's not true. Really? I mean, I'm not saying it isn't.

Yeah. I know it is true. It's shocking. I'm astounded. I would not believe. If you said that wasn't statistical, I would say, no, prove it.

And now you just did with the data. That's that is amazing. And here's my thought as I read this book. I'm going to read this book. I'm going to read this book. I'm going to read this book. I'm going to read this book. I'm going to read those stats. I thought, oh man, like this is so important.

And yet I feel like we aren't addressing this and talking about it enough in the church, from the pulpit, even like for our ministry of what we're doing, like, oh, we need to address this and really recognize and help families as they're dealing with. Yeah. One of the first, I think it might've been the first phone call I ever got from Mr. Ron Deal. I don't know if you remember this.

Ron's in the studio with us today. And we're glad to have you back here. Welcome. We love being with you. Thank you.

I love being here. Yeah. I don't know if you remember this, but I did a message, boy, it had to be 10 or 15 years ago at our church. And I sort of apologized to the blended families. You do because you found it or heard it. And I get this call or email or text.

I can't remember. And it was basically, you know, I can't believe a pastor has apologized for this, but it was really the same feeling I had when you read those stats is I was naive and I felt bad. All the couples in our church sit there every week. And I don't realize how they're hearing what I'm saying. I'm talking to the nuclear families with one husband and one wife. And I didn't even grow up in that family. And yet that's who I predominantly taught to. And there they are sitting and they are not just a minority.

They're not even half. It's just crazy that this is the world we live in. So it's so good to have you here. I mean, many of our Family Life listeners know you're the director of blended family here at Family Life. You've written, spoken. And here's the thing. We're going to talk about your new book, but how many books have you written? Let's talk about that, Ron. Wow.

Okay. So this is book nine. I actually tell people it's nine and a half because one of them I did a revised edition of at one point and it became 50 percent new. So I'm going to I'm going to add that in there.

Nine and a half books and probably close to about 15 or 16 resources if you add video curriculum and small group studies and different things. And are they all on blended? They're all on blended families. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, obviously the first question would be, OK, do we need another one?

Yeah. And I'm so glad you asked because you guys, I'm so excited about this book, Preparing to Blend, in part because I feel like it's culminating this series. It is a book for engaged couples. I've written for dating single parents who are trying to navigate that space and figure out what role their kids have in the dating process and how they make decisions about moving forward. We have a number then of books for people living in a step family situation. The Smart Step Family, the Smart Step Mom, Smart Step Dad books really get into the parenting and what it is to be in that role. Building Love Together in Blended Families with Gary Chapman is all about applying his love language principles to bonding in a blended family.

And what's the wisdom behind that? And we have a book on finances to dig down into the nitty gritty of step family finances and how things are just unique and different there. But we didn't have a book for engaged couples. And I got to tell you, yesterday I got an email from a woman who was calling for a book for engaged couples.

Oh, that's encouraging. She says, I'm a biological mother of three, a step mom of six. My husband and I have been married for nine years. Even after nine years, she said yesterday we realized that we went into this marriage with non-matched expectations. In other words, what she thought and expected, what he thought and expected.

And so she said, we are going back and reading The Smart Step Family again, but we really think that there needs to be a book to help couples on the front end about to get married. And I was like, guess what? Unbelievable. Unbelievable. I mean, what a perfect email. That should be your intro chapter.

I know. It's like, wow. It's really great. And you know, the book is really a culmination of a lot of emails, a lot of feedback from people and counseling that I've done for 25 years with families. And I've done tons of pre-step family counseling with couples. And I've spent a lot of time talking with pastors through the years about what they do in their premarital work.

And, you know, there just is a need because, guys, there's a gap. There is a gap in what we offer in the local church to couples getting married when one or both of them is bringing children to the relationship. So, Ron, you're saying it's different because there's a lot of premarital material out there. But for the blended family, is there anything out there in terms of premarriage?

You know, there's a few things that are kind of hard to put your hands on, but what there is not. And I'm just I'm excited to share this with our listeners. What there is not is any sort of standard of how you go about doing premarital counseling.

So let me just back up for our listeners. This book is a do-it-yourself guide for couples. They can just pick it up and on their own go through it and kind of give themselves premarital counseling, if you will. So they don't need a mentor. They don't need.

Should they, though? Yes, absolutely. What is better and what I strongly encourage right in the introduction is connect with a pastor, a mentor, a lay couple, somebody who will walk you through this premarital process. And we have a leader's guide that is a free PDF download for leaders who want to know how to structure their counseling sessions, utilizing the book. So it's this whole program, if you will, on how to do pre-blended family counseling.

But notice my language. Pre-blended family counseling. It's not premarital. Oh, that's different, isn't it?

Here's the difference. Premarital counseling, you know, traditionally is focused on the couple. Right. Because really it's sort of like if you're thinking traditional family, you're thinking first marriage, couple getting married.

It's just the two of them. They haven't started life yet. And so premarital counseling is couple centric, if I could say it that way. But when you're trying to prepare a couple to lead a family, kids are involved and sometimes the kids are five, sometimes they're 15, sometimes they're 35, right? Kids are adults and on their own and later in life somebody's getting married.

So there's all sorts of scenarios and there's more people involved. So you're not just preparing them for coupleness, as I like to say, you're preparing them for family-ness. And as it turns out, we know, we've talked about this so much here on Family Life Today, couples get married and form a blended family because they've fallen in love with a person. But they divorce because they don't know how to be a family.

That's where the rubber meets the road. And if premarital counseling only talks to them about their husband-wife relationship and does not talk to them about parenting, about step-parenting, about working with a co-parent in another home, about managing loss or finances, those are the things that cause stress and ultimately deconstruct the couple's relationship and tear them apart. It's so interesting that you say that because I have friends that have entered into a blended family, whether it be through a death or a divorce. And every one of those friends that I've talked to before the wedding, they're not thinking so much about the wedding as their kids because they feel like their kids have been through trauma and they're worried about them. And so for you to address the whole family is pivotal to me. It is.

I mean, it really is. We've got to not just help the couple think about being a couple. We've got to help them strengthen their coupleness, yes, and also engage their children around the realities that are coming and try to prepare the children and begin to create identity. And I know I'm talking fast here, but fundamentally what a blended family has to develop in order to be successful long term is a family identity. Meaning, what is our last name? It's sort of like that's a really good metaphor. Well, you have one last name and we have a different last name.

Guess what? That doesn't mean we're not family, but it does mean we come from different places and we're not naturally family. We have to figure out a way to bond, to create ritual and identity within our home and within our relationships. We have to bring definition to those relationships. That is a journey. If we can help families, adults and kids, start that journey intelligently, intentionally, even before the wedding takes place, it gives them momentum for life after the wedding. So as a couple and a family does this, so is the whole family involved reading the book? You know, you've got step kids interacting.

Great question. So here's the way it's structured. The book is for the couple, right? And you can imagine a mentor, somebody like yourselves doing premarital counseling in a local church, walking through the book with this couple. They're going to read a chapter. Each chapter talks about an important concept related to blended family living. And then it's going to give them what I call a growing activity. It's going to give them something to do to actually put that into practice, to implement the principles. Sometimes that includes the children.

Some of the chapters, 10 working growing activities. Sometimes it's just the couple working on it together. Sometimes they engage their children. Sometimes it's one child at a time. Sometimes it's a family group. In the leader's guide, we actually invite leaders, hey, if you're comfortable inviting kids to come in with the couple and have sort of a family session, you can do some of this in your presence, but you can also have the family do it between the sessions and then come to you and sit down with you and process out loud as a couple. Here's what we heard from our children.

Here's what we think it means. And then you can offer some guidance along the way. I mean, do you find that couples that are merging into a blended situation, are they more motivated? You know, because sometimes when I've when I've done premarital with a young couple and maybe even an older couple, but they've never been married.

Yes. Part of the time you're sitting there as the leader, they're not listening. They think it's easy. They, you know, we thought the same thing. But you're like, OK, I'll talk to them in six months. Then they're going to be like, oh, my goodness, we need help. But I'm guessing a blended situation. They know better. It kind of depends on the back story. Yeah. There's a thing we call idealistic distortion.

Prepare and rich profile. You can give a couple the profile and it actually measures how unrealistic they are about the future and their relationship. And that distortion idealism skews their views about the strength of their relationship.

You can measure that. Couples forming blended families have lower idealistic distortion. They have already learned something in life about relationships and family and not everybody entering a blended family.

You can imagine a future step parent who's never had any kids and never been married before. They don't have the same experience as their partner does. But somebody has been through a death or a divorce or a serious breakup of a relationship that had children connected to it. And so somebody's got some life experience. Many times these couples are in their mid 50s, early 60s.

Definitely life experience. And so, no, they're not naive. But even though they are less idealistic, they are still naive about the process of becoming a family. So the assumption is, hey, I know more about marriage. I've learned what not to do. I know from the last relationship what not to do. I've learned a few things. It's going to be different or had a great first marriage ended in the death of my spouse.

I definitely want more of that. I have an idea of what marriage looks like and what it requires of me. But they're only thinking and focused on coupleness. To your point, Ann, they may be mindful of their children, but they really don't know how to include them in the process, to dialogue with them. Maybe they kind of say, what are you guys thinking?

How are you feeling about this? And the kids give a little something back and sometimes adults hear it better than the kids are really saying it. And so they discount, oh, yeah, that'll be fine once we're all living in the same house. And so there's still this minimalization of the process and the journey of becoming a family together.

They can't live in that space because if they do, then it's sort of like they get blindsided quickly after the wedding. And they're like, what happened? I mean, if there's one email I've gotten through the years more than anything, it's why didn't anybody tell us that some of these challenges were coming? And so it's sort of like, yeah, let's tell them. Let's talk about it. Let's prepare for that and let's take the sting out of it so that when it happens, you go, oh, Dave and Ann told us about that.

Now I know what that is and we know what to do about it. That's a totally different experience. And it is in some ways it's surprising because you're thinking, well, they've been through this once or twice or more. There's no way they're going to be naive, but it's still going to happen a little bit. Like you're saying, like, you know, I was thinking, you know, our two sons that have kids before they had kids, we're trying to tell them, oh, you have no idea.

Wait. You know, and they're like, oh, it can't be that. And then they have them like, we had no idea. With a blended couple getting married, you're thinking they know. But you're saying they still don't know completely. So here's the question.

What do they need to know? What are the things that they're still blind to? Well, first of all, let me just say this gap that I kind of talked about, this premarital gap. First of all, statistically, almost half of all couples get some sort of premarital education.

I don't know if you knew that. That's a high number, I think. And most of them get that premarital education from some religious institution, a church or synagogue or something. But it's about 25 percent or less of pre-blended family couples get any sort of premarital counseling. So number one, it's a huge gap just in terms of what they get. Number two, those who do go to their local church and pastor and say, hey, can we have premarital counseling? They probably get the same thing. Most of them that the 25 and 26 year old first time married couple without children are getting.

And it's couple centric and it's filled with good stuff. They're learning skills on how to manage conflict and manage money and some elementary things like that. But they are not learning anything about the blended family dynamic and the stressors that they're going to have to face once reality comes. And so obviously you don't want to give them the same thing because it's a different dynamic.

What are the kind of things they have to have their eyes open to? OK, so let me just run through some of the chapters, for example. Chapter one, I'm going to have them go online and create a digital genogram of their family, which is a map. And there's a new tool that's available.

I've partnered with the organization. And so people can go and do that online for very cheap. And they're going to get a picture of their family, the children, the other households, all the adults. And they're going to get a sense of the relationship temperatures, if we could put it that way, going on between those relationships between children and dad in the other home and children and future stepdad, dating mom. So it's this digital map.

It is. And it prints out and it gives them the snapshot. And one of the first I mean, I want to do that anyway. Doesn't it sound like fun? Yeah, I've been doing genograms with families for years and years and years.

And now you can do it online. And here's the thing. A lot of people look at that and they go, oh, wow, there's four households connected to our family.

There's look at all these adults, look at all these children, look at all these the movement between homes. Oh, look, my daughter has great relationships with those three people and really tough ones with these two people. I wonder what that's like for her. And so it forces all these things to the surface where you begin to ask new questions and you begin to ponder and you can think together. How do we help plan?

How do we prepare? Not just for us, but for my daughter. Have most blended families never done that? Oh, most families have never. I was going to say, I don't know any families that have really done that.

I'm just I was asking because when we first did it in what our third year of marriage, we're at seminary counseling class. I didn't never heard of a genogram, you know, and so we did one and it's the light bulb. It's like, look at this alcohol. There's patterns.

Look at this pattern. Four generations going from grandpa to this generation to my dad. And now, wow, no wonder I think about alcohol. And then you add in the blended aspect and I'm trying to merge a new family. That is critical to understand, especially before. I was scared by it. Like, we are messed up and there is this sense of doom like, oh, no.

But it also awakened me to, oh, now I see. And there you go. That's what we're doing for these blended families. We're just helping them anticipate and think through what's going to be happening, what you're really creating here. See, so many people define their family as spouse, two spouses and however many kids.

Right. And so when you say who's in your family, they often go, well, it's me, it's her. And here are the children. And blended family couples tend to do the same thing. But the reality is, from a kid's point of view, it's me, it's her, it's the kids. And it's the other household, other parent and their new spouse. And it's the other household, other parent and their new live-in cohabiting spouse. And then grandparents with the cohabiting and with the former.

And now we have eight sets of grand. That's the reality. And all of a sudden, you know, that's the stuff you're going to navigate in holidays and birthdays and establishing rituals and traditions in your home. Let's start now anticipating that rather than going at the first birthday after the wedding going, oh, wow, I never really thought about how we're going to do this. No, let's get out in front of it.

So that's an example. We talk about expectations. We talk about planning your wedding, which I'd love to come back to a little bit.

We talk about deciding what to call each other, like terms and names. Are you my stepmom? Are you my bonus mom? Do I call you? How do I refer to you as that? And by the way, I kind of like to call you mom, but if I do, I think my mom will throw a fit. So I better not call you mom. That whole conversation needs to happen at some point.

Don't just assume those labels are going to be easy for people to figure out. I say have a conversation and co-create something everybody is okay with, can live with, and that gives you a foundation to begin building your relationships. That's the kind of stuff we're going to do in this book. We're going to talk about parenting. We talk about grief and how weddings resurrect grief.

Oh, yeah. We talk about anticipating change and what will change. Having a conversation with kids about, you know, you're going to be going to a new school. We're going to be living in a different house. It's going to take us 25 minutes longer to get you to school in the morning.

That means you have to get up earlier. Those are the little things that are the truth about merging homes. And the reason that's important is because if you, as a kid in particular, have had a series of unwanted changes in your life and then all of a sudden somebody says, you've got to get up 45 minutes earlier than you used to get up, that'll just be the straw that breaks a camel's back for some kids.

If they didn't see that coming, then they can't speak into it. But if we get out in front and we help anticipate and we make it a family discussion, how are we going to deal with these realities together? All of a sudden kids have a little bit of power that they didn't have otherwise, and that makes a big difference in how the family moves forward. What difference, I should know this, does premarital mentoring counseling have on a marriage?

And obviously, what difference is it going to make on a blended family? I'm so glad you asked, because we know premarital counseling works. Couples who go through premarital counseling show a 30% increase in the quality of their overall relationship immediately. Couples who've been through premarital counseling have a 31% decreased chance of getting divorced year over year from couples who never had premarital counseling. Couples who go through premarital counseling do better on 80% of the measures of relationship satisfaction and quality than couples who don't go through premarital counseling. It works. Why, Ron?

Those statistics are pretty important. Why does it work? What helps us?

It works for the same reason family life exists. We help people get intentional with their walk with the Lord and how they walk it out in their most intimate relationships, pursuing the things that matter most, right? Isn't that what we say? That's what we want to help people do?

And we do that with intentionality. So we're building emotional and spiritual intelligence into people and how they love one another. That's essentially what premarital counseling does, and it makes a difference. So this isn't, part of me is like, I want to say blended families go get it. But it isn't just blended families, because if I want to help someone, I want to go get it as well and have a resource literally in my hand to be able to, I mean, what a great tool. And as you said, it's a companion tool to our own Preparing for Marriage Here at Family Life.

Talk about that real quick. Yeah, so Preparing for Marriage is a book that's been around a long time. Family Life has really put a lot into that book, and it too is a kind of do-it-yourself guide for couples, that leaders have a guide that allows them to walk a couple through that whole process. This book, Preparing to Blend, is a sister book to that. They're co-companions, if you want to say it that.

They're just designed for a different audience. They're a blended family. That's right. It's a blended family book. So if you're a pastor or a leader right now, you can have a tool for every couple that walks in the door, whether it's a first marriage situation or a blended family. By the way, I just said first marriage, and it reminded me of another stat. Did you guys know 15% of all first marriages give birth to a blended family? That is a new stat, really, and I'm sharing it with everybody I can, because I think we have this narrative in our heads about divorce and remarriage. Yes, sometimes it's somebody who's widowed, but increasingly in our culture, first marriages are giving birth to blended families because one of the adults has a child. That was a child born out of wedlock with another parent that they're not married to or was never married to.

15% is a lot, right? And if one of the two adults is over the age of 30 or above, it jumps to 25% of first marriages form blended families. This is going to be increasingly something that churches have an opportunity to step in and make a difference in somebody's life. And if premarital counseling in general works, imagine targeted, designed-for-blended-family premarital education for this couple who's walking in who just doesn't know what they don't know, and you gently lead them into the space and help them to be intentional in ways that they never would have anticipated.

Next thing you know, they're off and running. The momentum has started even before the wedding has occurred. If our goal is to help couples thrive in marriage and if premarital preparation is part of how you accomplish that, increasingly, as Ron Deal has just said, we have got to know about the unique challenges facing couples who are forming a blended family, whether it's the kind of first marriage he was talking about or couples who have been previously married coming together to form a new family.

Ron has a book that addresses this subject called Preparing to Blend. It's brand new, and we've got copies of it in our Family Life Today Resource Center. You can go online to get your copy or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. There's also an event coming up in two weeks. People from all around the country are going to be gathering in suburban Atlanta, Georgia, for a two-day conference called the Summit on Step-Family Ministry, and the theme this year is prepare, helping couples prepare for forming a blended family.

So that's where the focus will be. If you're involved in family ministry in a local church, if you have somebody at your church who heads up family ministry, let them know about this event. If you've got a heart for couples and want to be used by God in their lives, doing premarital preparation for couples who are forming blended families, plan to attend yourself. All the details are available online at FamilyLifeToday.com. You can go there for more information. The dates are October 14th and 15th.

That's a Thursday and a Friday. Again, it's in the Atlanta area, but there are going to be people coming from all across the country for this two-day event. Again, find out more at FamilyLifeToday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY if you have any questions, and use that same information if you'd like to get a copy of Ron Deal's new book, Preparing to Blend, call 1-800-FL-TODAY or go online at FamilyLifeToday.com. You know, this subject and this upcoming event really is tied directly to what we're all about at Family Life. Our mission is that every home would become a godly home.

Whatever the circumstances that are bringing you together as husband and wife, as you're raising your kids, our goal is that your family would continually be pointed back toward Jesus and the Gospel, what the Bible has to say about building strong relationships and strong families. And those of you who are not just Family Life Today listeners, but who help support this ministry, you make all of this possible through your financial support and your prayers for us here at Family Life Today. Thank you to those of you who have given in the past. And if you're a regular listener and you've never made a donation, let me invite you to join the team and help make Family Life Today possible going into the future. Help pay it forward.

You can donate today online at FamilyLifeToday.com or call 1-800-FL-TODAY. And we just want to say thanks in advance for supporting this mission. And on behalf of the hundreds of thousands of couples who are helped every day here at Family Life, thank you for making it all possible. And we hope you can join us again tomorrow. Ron Deal will be here again. We're going to continue looking at the issues that couples who are forming blended families need to be thinking about before they say, I do. We hope you can be here for that. On behalf of our hosts, Dave and Anne Wilson, I'm Bob Lapine. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a production of Family Life, a crew ministry, helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.