🙃 On (not) loving your stepkids

Which btw is normal and doesn’t make you a bad stepparent.

Here’s something I wish I would’ve learned much earlier in my stepparenting adventures: not loving your stepkids is totally, completely normal. You’re not an inherently bad stepparent if you’re not crazy about your stepkids. The stepparent-stepkid relationship is a complex one, and love between a stepparent and a stepkid isn’t instant or automatic.

Loving our stepkids (or not) is a loaded topic. We’re supposed to love our stepkids, aren’t we?! Surely not loving our stepkids would make us monsters!! 😱

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011 | The L word (Love, that is)

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We’re convinced we must be the worst stepparents ever. We’re so ashamed of our own awfulness that we won’t even admit we have these feelings. Maybe not even to ourselves, but certainly not out loud to other people!

And because we don’t dare talk about not loving our stepkids, we never realize just how many other stepparents feel the exact same way.

There are so many valid reasons stepparents can struggle to connect with our stepkids. Maybe your personalities clash, or maybe you can’t stand how much your stepkid acts like your partner’s ex. Maybe your stepkid has behavioral issues that makes spending time with them feel volatile or exhausting.