Guilt and pity

Gaining acceptance
As much as you would like, don't expect the teens to accept you as a co-parent, step-parent or even accept any kind of authority from you. This may be different if you come into the ready made family when the children are younger, but after they've passed the age of 12, forget it. The best you can hope for is acceptance based on who you are as a person. It's only now, after a full year of being involved in their lives, that I sometimes don't defer a decisions to their mother. Even then it's the kind of choices that have to do with personal boundaries, not so much the household rules.

My choice to openly defer the judgement to my girlfriend and repeatedly saying: "Your mom is boss, what she sais goes" was a message these youngsters needed to hear. During the two years after her marriage when she was working full time they had been allowed to run wild. Chris had become quite the spoiled little brat. She felt guilty for putting the kids through a divorce and she also felt sorry for them for having lost contact with their father. As a result they got away with murder.

Restoring boundaries
Chris's method is to forcibly take over. He is not as verbally gifted as his brothers (or maybe he is still growing in that aspect) so he physically forces her to play at his game. He likes roughhousing and won't take no for an answer. What results is difficult for me to watch: He oversteps her boundaries, time and again, while she fails to enforce them. When she does enforce her boundaries, he get's mad and slams the door, goes upstairs to his room and puts on some loud music. His behavior, according to Joyce is so reminiscent of her ex-husbands that sometimes she finds herself responding not to a little boy acting out, but to her abusive ex.

Dennis's way is more subtle but equally lacking in boundaries. He'll use every manipulative means at his disposal to get his way. He's a quick study and has taken to reading "The game", which is a book on manipulation, and has gotten some classes in Neuro Linguistic Programming which make his skills all the more dangerous. You have to be awake and alert with him, or before you know it, you find yourself agreeing to anything. He'd make a great salesperson, allthough his ambitions are slightly higher than that.

Soul searching
Fortunately Joyce was willing and able to look at her own role in the things that were happening in her household. Often when a child misbehaves, people point to the child and assign blame. While I don't believe in total innocence, even in children, I also believe that children will take your lead, if you provide them with the right guidance. In particular in a changing situation, they need clarity on the rules. To be honest, Joyce wasn't doing a very good job at providing them. In order for her to be the kind of parent they needed she had to find a way to leave her guilt and pity behind and take on full responsibility for what happens to the boys in her care.

In order to take on that responsibility she needed to do away with the survival habits she picked up living with her husband.To re-evaluate the rules that they had, both implicit and explicit. Some of the more destructive implicit rules were: "You don't ask for help from anyone", "We don't talk about our stuff outside the family" and "Mom is wrong all the time".

Joyces response to the hostile environment her husband provided was to go underground. In order for her to survive she had to lie a lot and lying can quickly become a habit. She also tried to protect her children from the brunt of their fathers anger by covering their tracks, another habit that appeared difficult to break. Here she was, two years after the breakup and she was still lying to avoid conflict, making excuses for her children when they failed to show up at school. Only now it was her children that were in the drivers seat. She resolved to give honesty a chance but it proved a process of months to truly give up all the fibbing (as well as have her kids get used to this new policy, they still protest vehemently)