Dear Concerned Citizen,

Dr. Phil’s new book Family First has one feature that sets it apart from the crowded shelves of family self-help books: his chapter on divorced and blended families. He has seen first hand that the official line we’ve been given about divorce and remarriage is misleading at best and down-right false at worst. You know the the “happy talk” I’m talking about: Divorce is no problem, if....

If the mother has enough money, if she spends enough time with the kids, they’ll do just fine. If the parents continue to work together in a loving cooperative way, the children will be better off than with a family life of continual strife. If the stepdad is loving and attentive, remarriage is no problem for kids. If the children know that their parents love them, they will have minimal difficulties adjusting to the necessary changes in their parents’ lives.

Dr. Phil knows from experience that those huge “ifs” don’t automatically occur in real life. Making those “ifs” come true takes an almost super-human effort. Because he is a positive type of guy, he doesn’t focus on the negatives. But by spelling out in detail what the biological and step parents need to do and not do, he makes it clear that divorce, remarriage and stepparenting is no picnic.

Many apologists for easy divorce used to assume that a lack of money caused the problems of single parenting. But social scientists who study family patterns closely are no longer so sanguine. They have found, for instance, that adding a stepparent to a single parent home does increase the financial resources available to the child, but that the presence of stepparents doesn’t necessarily help the child. In fact, in some ways the stepparent situation is more complicated and difficult than the single parent situation. Specifically, children with stepparents are more likely to have emotional problems. Dr. Phil’s material gives a clue as to why that might be the case.

He states, for instance, “It is my strong belief that unless you as the stepparent are added to the family when the children are very young, it will most likely be very difficult for you to discipline your spouse’s children.” Now, what kinds of observation might have led Dr. Phil to that conclusion?

He has seen, and I bet you have too, situations in which the kids resent discipline from the stepparent. A child disturbed by his parents’ divorce can make family life hell on earth. A wounded child can disrupt their parent’s new marriage. It is easy enough to understand the dynamic at work. Kids naturally resist any discipline, even though they need it. Children test boundaries even though children are profoundly comforted by having limits. Unless the husband and wife are absolutely on the same page, it is very easy for kids to triangulate between them. All parents have to deal with this problem.

Stepparenting is complicated by the fact that the parents are not naturally on equal footing in their relationship with the child. The biological parent already has a relationship with the child, and the step parent is stepping into the flow in mid-stream. The children and the biological parent may already have developed an “us against the world” posture from living in what Dr. Phil calls, the “divorce foxhole,” with all its stress. The biological parent can become protective toward the child, which is fine in itself. But if that protectiveness takes the form of shielding the child from any unpleasantness, including unpleasant consequences of their own behavior, the child can end up controlling the family with his “hurt” feelings. Statements such as “You aren’t my REAL dad” or “you aren’t REALLY my mom,” become loaded weapons in the family. A vindictive child can use these wounding words as a plausible excuse for that all-too-typical resistance.

Dr. Phil handles this material very gingerly, sensitively and without judgment. But he makes it clear that being a stepparent is a genuine challenge. Reading the chapter on single-parent families with an open mind, leads inevitably to the conclusion that marriage makes it easier to be a good parent. If you are married to your child’s other parent, and are on good working terms with them, raising successful children is going to be much easier and more straightforward. The happy talk we have been given that “children of divorce do just fine” is simply untrue. Dr. Phil does not come right out and bang the reader over the head. But the conclusion is almost impossible to avoid: successfully blending a family requires a lot of work.

Pastors should consider giving this chapter to couples contemplating divorce. Dr. Phil might help these struggling couples see that divorce won’t necessarily solve every problem they now face. As parents, they will still have to interact with each other, even after divorce. Sometimes, brand new problems emerge while old problems are simply transferred to a different arena.

I have often thought that if people worked as hard at making marriage work as they do at making divorce work, they might stay married. With a more accurate image of how much effort stepparenting really takes, people might be inclined to work harder at keeping their marriages together. Dr. Phil’s new book, Family First, is just the thing to give them that dose of reality.