Building Unity in a Blended Family with Mike and Kim Anderson

I'm really glad to talk to you guys. I got to tell you something. I got a special kind of dyslexia that I call Kim Lisa, and I call Lisa Kim. So it's possible that I might call you Lisa today. And that will just be a normal thing that happens on a normal like this. All right. Hey, I just said we just did an episode with, with Lisa, and I had to tell her that I'm about to call you Kim, so get get ready. All right? It's it's the weirdest thing. I don't know too much. I know it's kind of weird.

Yeah. Well.

We'll we'll call you on. On when you do. That's all right.

Yeah. No, we want that. It's kind.

Of a running.

Joke with it.

It's kind of a running joke on the podcast because it's a little piece of trivia about me.

Okay. Got it.

I'm also really glad to talk to you guys, because I tell you what, I have said for years that blended families is the hardest thing that I do in my practice. Like, there's, I'd rather have somebody come in and have ten affairs than try and figure out how to make their blended family situation work. So if you have expertise and insight, not only, am I excited to hear it, but I'm sure people are eager to understand like how? What's. So give me the cliff notes. Like how does it who who are you guys you know, is in general? And how do you how do you position this topic for your people?

Why don't you start? Because yours go back further in history.

You said, why? Why do we even do what we do with this whole blended family thing? Part of it for me is because I grew up in a highly dysfunctional blended family. I was very young when my mom passed away. Dad got remarried when I was around seven. Stepmom came in with an anger problem. We had a lot of chaos. I left home at 16, and, I've been on my own ever since, and, And so that created some challenges in my life that I've had to kind of work through. So fast forward and, I meet Kim. She's got a five year old daughter from a previous marriage. I fall in love with both of them, but we're getting ready to walk down the aisle, and I'm scared to death because we just.

I just have no idea. Like, is this going to be a repeat of what I grew up in? Am I actually going to be able to do this? I had a lot of doubt along the way. And so that was, in 2001, and we did walk down the aisle and, and then really started a journey of, okay, how do we learn about blended family life? How do we do it well, and how do we bring other people along the way.

And how do we help people avoid the huge mistakes we made? That's part of our our mission as well. We made some easy wrong turns that we just because we just didn't know what we didn't know. We didn't understand the dynamics. And how can we help others get on the front end of that and understand, you know, what to expect, what's normal, when to panic, when not to panic? Mostly. And how to maneuver around some of these, really challenging, things that they're up against so that they don't end up where we ended up at one point, which was on the verge of separation.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

So define your blended family for me. Is it Mike Kim Kim's daughter and then your own children.

Correct. That's exactly right. So, like I said, Annika Kim's daughter was five when we, when we got married. Since then, we've had two children, Phoebe and Jacob. And right now we're in an empty nest. So all of them have been launched and off and running.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So what, Annika, she's the one that lives in Seattle. Is that what you said?

Yeah. Yep.

That's pretty cool. Tell me about Mike. What was it like trying to. You fell in love with her? That five year old her. But then what? What was. How do you define your onboarding as her parent?

That's a great question. Well, you know, it's funny because I remember the first time I met Annika, actually, Kim had been talking to me a little bit about her, and we weren't quite sure. Are we actually dating or are we not dating? And, you know, we were going through all of that and, and actually, it turned out we were given, Kim was given a ride to a friend, and I was hopping in the car, and so I ended up in the back seat right next to a little five year old Annika. And, immediately she, like, connected with me. She was just like, hi, I'm Hanako, and we started talking and all this, and, you know, I'm expecting this little aloof little kid that I feel really inadequate and uncomfortable with. But that was the total opposite. And I still I can still see Kim, you know, looking in the rearview mirror kind of confused, like, oh, my gosh, she's actually talking to this guy.

I wonder what's up with that? And so the the connection with Annika initially was actually pretty easy. We got along really well. We still definitely get along to this day. Now, living together is a totally different thing. Yeah. Soon as we start getting under one roof and I come in, in my mid 20s, with no kids of my own, but a belief that because I know what I don't want. Because of what I experienced in my blended family of origin, that I thought then I knew how to get what I did want, but I was pretty wrong. Yeah. And so all of my parenting expertise was, was challenged pretty quick.

Yeah. You thought you were an expert? Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So I wanted to, you know, step into, all the positive parts of parenting. But I also found myself slipping into all of the really difficult parts of parenting that that relationship just couldn't bear on the front end, like, direction and correction. Basically, I needed to stay away from that. But it was really hard for me to stay away from them.

And we were not in partnership. No parents at the beginning. That was the biggest struggle.

Yeah.

Oh yeah. Say more about that. Kim is is Annika, is dad in the picture? Has he's basically been a part of the equation as well?

He has he has. And now it's kind of an interesting part of our story is the beginning. We co-parent quite well. There was lots of agreement.

You and Daniel.

Too. Yeah. Yeah. Me and my ex. Yeah. That was one of the things that kind of eased Mike's fears was, wow, they've got a great co-parenting relationship going around this little five year old. And you know, we did birthday parties together. We were able to go to her events and sit together. But there was a shift in that when Annika turned 12. And that's when things really became, challenging in our home. His attitudes turned against us when he kept Annika from us. And so that put us into the family courts for three long, painful years. And then Annika threw. Oh. Oh, wow. Riffic trauma. Yeah, yeah, she was kind of in this position of if she wanted to be accepted and loved by her dad, she had to reject and turn away from us. Even though nothing bad had happened.

And we still don't know what the catalyst was.

Still don't understand why. Yeah, it was very confusing. Oh, wow. So? So, yeah, you were,

I have a ton of questions about that, but I don't want to make him the main character of our talk today. So how do you. I guess I want to I want to ask questions that I know are hard for my blended family clients, but maybe you already know what some of these questions are like. You used a phrase a little bit earlier. What do you say? Correcting in a direction is certainly, surely that's a thing that you've formed a theory and a philosophy about that I would love for you to expand on more because there is this question of how much can I parent this kid that maybe doesn't belong to me, you know, and then how do you balance that?

Because, maybe I have another question a little bit later about loyalty, you know, and this would come in perhaps more for you, Kim. Like, where does your loyalty go? Does it go to your husband? Does it go to your kid? That's not his kid. That's not, you know, like so I probably asked two questions, but maybe you can just, riff for a little while and tell me what you think.

Absolutely.

Yeah. Questions.

Very good questions. You know, we we had a little bit of, awareness even heading down the aisle, because there's a guy named Ron Diehl. He has written more books about blended family life than really anybody, I think, in history. And, but he was in our home town in Bellingham, Washington, doing a two day seminar. The weekend before our wedding. And, having grown up in a really difficult blended family, I was like, oh, we are going to this. And, Kim's like, are you kidding? We're getting married next Friday. We've got a ton of stuff to do. And I'm like, I don't care. We have got to go learn. Because I was afraid, right? I wanted to make sure that we were able to, to be equipped and do something different.

So we learned a little bit about the importance of an incoming step parent, being able to to stay away from direction and correction and really just focus on connection. And really the root of that, at least where we have discovered in all our research comes from another expert named Patricia Popper. Now, in her book called Surviving and Thriving and Blended Families. And she just coined this little simple phrase connection before correction, always. That's like the step parents primary goal on the front end. Well, that's really difficult when an incoming step parent, comes in with some ideas of how kids should behave. Usually like respectfully do chores, you know, be nice. You know, all these little things that we have, these expectations that Kim and I, she talked about, we weren't partnering very well.

We didn't explicitly talk about. I just had certain expectations. Well, for for most single parents following divorce, often the default mode for parenting can be pretty permissive.

Yeah.

Because my kids just been through all this stuff. I'm feeling guilty about their pain and their strife and all of that. And so we get into these relational patterns during the single parent years that may not support the vision and expectation of this incoming step parent, then we don't talk about what our expectations are and then boom, we're in a we're in a culture clash. Right. Your your family culture is one thing. My family culture, single parent years, whatever preceded our relationship is, is well-established. And now we're trying to mash that together. And it can be really challenging.

And on top of that, the divorced parent or the parent who's been the single parent is grieving the fact that they only get part time with their child. Now I only have my daughter 50% of the time, and I want that time to be fun and enjoyable and make happy memories, not disciplining and nagging her about chores and this, that, and the other. Yeah. And and we're we're grieving a loss. And I've got a lot of guilt and heaviness around that. And, and so the last thing I want to do is step into this role of, you know, policing everything. But Mike's coming and going, whoa. Like some of these behaviors, if we don't get a handle on this, how is this going to play out later on?

Like he his viewpoint was very valuable because he saw the bigger picture of, man, this kid is kind of she's kind of running the show here parenting herself because I was a very permissive, if this continues, boy, she's going to have a rough time as an adult, functioning. And so he had this bigger picture. But of course, I'm still stuck in that. Oh my gosh, I can't you know, I can't, you know, actually discipline her because then we won't have fun this weekend. And we are both in very different places emotionally.

So naturally this step parent wants to step in. Well, if you're not going to do it, then I guess.

I have to do it. But the.

Problem then is now I'm actually setting I'm moving backward in my relationship with the child.

Sabotaging.

Yeah, because true authority is built on trust, not compliance.

Yeah. He might have what's called positional authority in that he's an an an adult in the home married to her mom, but he does not have relational authority with her yet. That's the goal. But if you rush right in and discipline and start trying to correct the child, you're actually doing more harm than good because that that's kind of depleting that trust in connection. And then you won't get to that place where you want to be.

Exactly.

Seems like you guys have a pretty clean math. What I mean is like, there's just kind of these like two lines. There's like the Mike to Kim line and then the Kim to arnica line or whatever. And then there's this dotted line between Onika and Mike like that. Like I could draw that out and make sense of that. What what do you see? Or what do you know about how that plays when two people have gotten divorced and then they come together and they bring their two kids, like each of them has maybe two children. And, you know, now the math gets way skewed and way more complicated. And maybe you have like, I don't know, I guess I want to understand a little bit about how this expands.

Great question. Yeah. Well it certainly gets more complex but the principles don't change that much when all of this has happened. You asked about loyalties earlier as well and the whole of that dynamic or the entire equation that you're talking about, you're talking about math. There is that loyalty piece that, that Kim tends to get stuck in in these difficult moments, has to do with her feeling like what we call the trap teammate. So she loves Annika, she loves Mike. And what she really wants is for Annika. Mike to be connected and and to love each other as well. But on a day to day basis, it feels like if I lean into what Annika wants, then I'm betraying Mike or I'm letting him down or disappointing him. But if I go the other way and lean into what Mike wants now, I'm betraying or letting down Annika or disappointing her.

So no matter what I do, I'm disappointing someone. I'm trapped like a rope and a tug of war being pulled in two different directions. Well, that also sets me up to. To be what we call the stranded stranger. And so, that I feel like I'm on the outside, like Kim and Annika. They got this tight little thing, they got a bond going. They've got inside jokes. They've got all this history longer than the history of me with Kim. And so there's this little bio bubble that I can't quite penetrate, and sometimes I can't even name it. I just feel like I'm on the outside, even in my own home.

It doesn't.

Belong. Yeah, well, that actually occurs also as we expand the story.

Yeah.

So when two single parents come together now both of us are experiencing both the trapped teammate and the stranded stranger experience, but we're doing it simultaneously. Or maybe in an alternating way.

Yeah.

And so the principle, like I said a little bit ago, the principles still don't change. Stepparent your job is connection, overcorrection, especially in the early years.

Trust and relationship over time.

That's right bio parent. Your job is to stay in the lead when it comes to parenting and setting course direction and correction once again. But our job as a couple is to get united about the vision for our home. What are the values, the character traits, the life skills that we really want our home to be about? How are we going to define that in a, in a very specific way? And then how do we deliver that to the kids without them feeling lectured and then actually stick to it in everyday parenting when we when we can partner and get united around that, it really minimizes that stranded stranger trap teammate experience.

Right on. So how do you do that? Like what? How do you partner? Are there specific tips and tricks. And you know, I'm sure there are things that you have for your clients. But how do they how they show up for you inside your own house?

Great. Great question. What would you say hunt.

The the tips and tricks? Well, one thing we asked couples to do when they when we see they're struggling with us is we ask them each to grab a pad of paper and a pen and separately, without peeking, make a list. What do you believe the top five values are in your home, and what's most important in your home? And they write them down and then we compare the lists. And usually couples are very surprised to see the differences in the lists. And how that was important to you. Oh I didn't realize that was important to you. And often even the words they're using. So they might have the same word on their list. But then when we ask them to describe what that actually means in their home, their description of the same word like respect, can mean a lot of different things.

For people, their description of the same word is different. So they might even be using the same words, but they're completely missing the mark because they're coming from two different playbooks. So if the two adults aren't even clear about what the priorities and the values are in the home, how are the kids supposed to know what the expectation is like?

Yeah. Or if they don't? Confusing if the two adults have two different definitions of respect. For example. Yes. Then that's going to be confusing. That's interesting perspective I like that, yeah.

You asked how does that play out in your home. This is a this is a one.

Yes. How is the place in your home.

Yeah exactly. Yeah. In our home. Right. Yeah.

And yeah.

And there's a very specific story kind of around that. We were actually in the first house that we, first lived in after we got married, and, I don't know, we were maybe 6 or 7 months in, and I remember coming home and, anarchist toys were just, like, all over the couch and all over the living room. And I had had a long day at work. I wasn't at my best, that's for sure. And I just got really frustrated. Why do I gotta move all these toys out of the way just so I could sit down on the couch and, you know, blah, blah, blah. And at one point in my in my immature response to all of that, I said, I just feel so disrespected. And it was like, record scratch, right? And Kim's like, timeout.

What, what.

What do you mean disrespect?

Talk it. That felt disrespectful. That made no sense to me.

Exactly. It didn't connect for her. And there was one early moment we didn't even know what we had stumbled over until years later when we were reflecting back on this. Oh. That was a misalignment in the values, or at least the way we communicated our values, and that drove that stranded stranger trap teammate experience for us. Right. And so we had to start figuring out, well, wait a second, if Mike's definition of respect is a and Kim's definition of respect, his B, what will what will the C definition be that represents us?

Both of us.

Right? What is our shared definition of respect? And we had to start figuring that out and then start talking to the kids about it in a way they could onboard.

It and living it out in parenting as well.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah. And the other part of that is that, you know, once I understood what feels disrespectful to you to come home to a mess in the living room, I understand that. And at the same time, a kid's a messy kid. I'm kind of a messy person. We're wired differently than mine, and I don't really want to be the clutter police 24 seven. And so we had to come to some agreements around what it meant to, to, for me to come home and feel respected in his own home, which he should have, is a valid thing for him and me, to be honest with what I'm capable and able to do at that point. So at that point, I'm coming out of these permissive patterns with my daughter that had been going on for a while, and so I'm not going to be able to do a hard shift and all of a sudden go from allowing her to leave clutter everywhere, and all of a sudden everything needs to be in a place.

Get on top of this. That's an unrealistic expectation for a bio parent to make big, huge changes. So we had to find the middle ground agreement of what was going to work in this season around this topic of disrespect or respect. And what we agreed on was I would hold Annika accountable for the common areas of the House. So the living room, the kitchen, and I would sit down and let her know what the expectation was in a very loving way. And then when I saw she wasn't living that out, I would be the one to step in and say, you know, hey, honey, how does leaving your toys all over the living room uphold our value of respect?

And I would call her and lovingly, you know, redirect her. But when it came to the rest of the house, like her room in particular, I just I just wasn't going to go there. That was not a priority for me. And I just couldn't do the clutter. Police around every little nook and cranny in the home.

So neat freak Mike had to put his blinders on when he walked by Annika door. But also I had to let some stuff go of, you know, these this idea that, oh, it's a character thing. If my child isn't keeping their room clean, interesting like I had to, I just start letting that go and say, you know what, maybe. Maybe it's not a full on requirement to keep that bedroom free of clutter all the time. Yeah, and that was that was it sounds silly, but that was really hard for me to let them let that go.

I'm chuckling because, one of, one of our, our biological children and our.

Mutual.

Kids, Phoebe is way more messier than Annika ever was. So I'm like, I just face that with his own biological child. Oh, boy, this is it.

I'm curious. Mike. In in in that. Did you consciously, unconsciously find that you were giving Phoebe a pass that you weren't giving Monica or. No, it was the same.

That's a great question.

I could answer that. Okay. What do you observe? My observation. It wasn't that he gave her a pass, but he was less frustrated and more willing to step into it and help her. So but it was later on in the journey he had matured. So with Anika, it was just frustration. Why is this kid so messy? Why can't she learn to put stuff away? Doesn't she, you know, know how to take care of thing with Phoebe? It was. Hey, honey, let's sit down and talk about how we can organize your room better. And let's see what we can let go. Vent. Right. He was much more, willing to step into the mess and help her than he was with Anika, I would say. Yeah.

Well, and then one thing that you definitely did was, you got to watch her go from 0 to 5 and develop.

Exactly.

Into a messy person because of whatever nature nurture. Totally that you didn't get to witness around. So you came in with this should filter should filter her, you know, and that was just made up by your ignorance. More than informed by your experience. Yeah. Got it.

Yeah. I want to kind of point something out in the story as well Zach. That's kind of underlying there but really important. And and we continue to fight with the, with the couples we work with. You know, Kim described how, you know, I would kind of come in and, you know, silly little story about clean up your toys in the living room and those kinds of things. And, she talked about how she needed to start lovingly, correct. Anika and kind of walk her through the process of changed behavior. Makes a lot of sense. The the challenge for most of us is even if we do this kind of connection before correction fairly well as a step parent and bio parent steps into the correction and discipline role.

The way they step into it is really critical as well, because if it's a hard shift, like Kim said earlier about making a hard shift when that occurs, then who is the child actually going to blame for the new expectations step parent? We didn't have to do this until Mike came along.

Yup. It's all their.

Fault. And so now this bond that we're trying to actually build in this step relationship is getting sabotaged, even though it's still by a parents stepping into the discipline role. So there's some nuance in there because ultimately what we what we want to create is a natural bond that starts to emerge because of the climate that we create in the in the home. And so, sure, we could do that technically. Really? Well, stepparent doesn't do disciplined bio parent does. But man, when kids are feeling that hard shift, it's almost like that hard turn on a roller coaster and they're just tossed around and they're going, what the heck? Yeah, we never did this until they came along.

Yeah.

So we have to be strategic about that.

Yeah. And and how we communicate the values to the kids. Absolutely. That's that's the most important part. Sometimes it seems to make sense that, oh you know, we're united now. We need to be a united front with the kids. And these are the expectations that we have. And again kids will see that as, ooh, this new person is influencing my parent. I don't like this. It's better for the bio parent to take the brunt because they have that natural authority with their children and that relationship. It's better for them to go into, you know, kids.

To be the have you been.

Doing? Yes. It's a say, you know, I've been doing it. You would just service by not teaching you how to clean up after yourself and not teaching you how to do chores. These are skills you're going to need in your life. And so we're going to do a chore chart because this is important to me. And it's something I want for you. It's all in the delivery. Yeah. And the bio parent takes that on and wants it for their children. It's not something we want from them. We want this. We want you to comply and do these things. No, these are things we want for you. These are character building things that are going to serve you well. And so it's all in the delivery that helps the child on board the new change without going, wait a minute. Recycling? Yeah. I mean, to be,

I have a little meta question for you, Mike, which is this thing that you've taken on as part of your identity or even your career? What is it done to your story of being a stepchild? As a child, it hasn't changed. It has. It made you, you know. Yeah.

It's brought a lot of healing for me. When I went to that seminar a week before our wedding, it actually was a starting point, a catalyst up to that point. I'd been about seven years, I think, since I had talked to my dad and stepmom. And, I think that was a catalyst for me toward forgiveness, and towards some healing in the relationship. There, because it explained a lot about why things happened the way they did when I was young. It didn't excuse it. My parents were still the adults. They still had some responsibility. But they were also in an era where, you know, therapy was looked at as really bad. And so reaching out to get help around that kind of stuff just wasn't available in the way that it is today. And so that definitely has reshaped and healed a big piece of my, my history and my story.

And I just explained, oh, now I see. I mean, his his step mom was definitely, struggling with anger because there wasn't the discipline that she wanted. And she stepped into that role very quickly. And, and his dad handed it over. He just kind of abdicated.

Exactly.

Yeah. Which is unfortunate. Yeah, yeah.

So I started by saying, man, it's the hardest thing I do like. It is easily the most challenging piece, but it seems like you guys have made some peace with it for yourselves and perhaps for your clients. Like when they come in and they say, this is really hard, like, what's the what do you start? Well, what's the first thing you hand them? Great piece of wisdom, piece of perspective. Like how do you make it easier?

Yeah. For folks. Yeah. Yeah. It's a great question. You know, there's there's nuance to that, obviously. Right. I always say stepfamilies are kind of like fingerprints, you know, from a distance they all look kind of the same. But the closer we get, each one is quite unique. And there are some unique pieces to each one at the same time as a pattern. What we typically see is there's two primary starting points for most couples that that we get to start working with. One we've actually been describing today. Kim's talking about how do we name those values, character traits, life skills, how do we get a shared definition for those, and then how do we activate those in everyday parenting every day? Family life? Most couples, in fact, the ones that come to us, they're five years, ten years in, they just can't seem to connect.

Their partnership around parenting just never came together.

Yeah, we start unpacking that and they go, man, we've never actually talked about that.

We've never had this ten year.

Thing, and we've never had this discussion about what are the important things for our home.

And the kids are so confused.

So that's a that's starting point number one. The other starting point, often will precede that if they just can't get through it. And that is how do we even talk to each other about emotional things. And so communication patterns around things that are really emotional. And let's face it, our kids are emotional for us. And every time we enter into a conversation together where I might have to say, I'm not so sure that I like that behavior that I'm seeing from your child that's actually getting interpreted inside of Kim, as you think I'm a bad parent and my kid's a brat. And it's like, actually, that's not it at all. I just want to see if we can activate some change, that's all. But we can't get to that if we're just tripping over our own communication and one of us is shutting down and one of us is blowing up, and then and then we never get to the actual dialog.

So those are kind of the two primary starting points we usually we usually find.

Yeah.

And then what is the I don't know, the goal that you give them. Like what's the vision or the outcome that you are inviting or that you're actually experiencing here you are empty nesting and you're kind of done with this part, the parenting part anyway, in the way that you have been like, what do you what do you cast as the vision for success for blended families?

Well, that's so fun. And the reason I jump I'm sorry, honey, I'm jumping right in there because we actually ask them. The cast is going.

To say that to them.

And the the way we do that. So in one, and one place where we serve couples, we have a, community, the couples can join and we've got a whole online curriculum in there. And the very first lesson in module one asks them to imagine. Imagine you're at a barbecue 15 years in the.

Future with your kids.

All the adult kids are there, and somehow a question gets asked, what was it like growing up in your home? What do you want to hear from the kids? From your kids and stuff? Kids, what is it you want to hear? Yeah, whatever you define as what you want to hear. That's the vision. That's what we're after. Now let's start putting the building blocks into place.

Totally, totally. I do the same thing with my clients. Except I'm a little. I'm a little nastier about it. I say, let me tell you something. It's going to happen. Your kids are going to be in therapy, and therapist is going to say, tell me about your parents. And what was it like.

There, you.

Know, what do you want them to say? Like if you were a fly on the wall, you know, and the reality is, like, Mike, for you, if you were a if your parents were a fly on the wall and they heard you describe growing up at their house, they might be embarrassed. They may not have the capacity for embarrassment. That's a totally different thing. But like, they might be upset or sad. And I'm like, if you're not, if you're not upset or sad, if you're actually, like, thrilled about what you're hearing your kids say, what is that? What are those words and that and the that's the vision. So I'm glad that I'm glad that, I'm glad that we're tracking in the same wisdom universe somehow. That's that's.

A yeah, yeah, yeah, that would be their goal. But you know, our goal as as helpers, as coaches is to equip them with the skills that they need to work as a team to communicate well, to build that parenting partnership to parent their children. We do a lot of coaching around parenting and and to to take one step at a time to reach those goals. That's kind of our over arching goal. And undergirding all of that is to cultivate hope. Yeah, we get a lot of folks that come to us that are just hopeless. They just wait. They you know, we've tried everything. We've done this, we've done that. We're just everything's just a train wreck and they've just kind of lost all hope.

And they're stuck in this negative pit. And so that's kind of the first, first thing we do is try to help, you know, affirm and validate. Yeah. This is hard. This is really tough. And these are difficult challenges you're facing. And it's not the end of the story. And let's roll up our sleeves and get to work like, this is not hopeless. And then we start pointing out the positives. Here are some things you've got going in your favor. And I'm like, oh yeah, yeah, you're right. Like this is not so bad. I was like.

Yeah, can I can? I had just one thought to that.

Sure. Of course.

I think another piece from a vision standpoint is, you know, there's some research that suggests that a really healthy remarriage can actually help undo some of the pain underneath that the kids experience through the divorce or separation process, because they have this new vision of what a healthy marriage can be, which they never had before.

Yeah.

And, that for me is a huge vision as well, because it starts to equip the next generation, our kids that, you know, we feel bad about. We are dealing with this stranded stranger trap teammate. We got all these things going on. But it actually we, we lose sight of the fact that we are putting on display what our children might hope for, for their marriage.

And we can do it the.

Way we do it. Well, the research shows it actually helps us children to enter into adulthood with something new.

We can model healthy conflict resolution totally. We can model healthy communication and and family really into our into marriage. Totally. Yeah. I mean, sadly, you know, the statistics show that the divorce rate is double for remarried couples. And it's not surprising to us because it's so hard. Right? It's probably not surprising to you either. Like they're under so much.

Maybe you have to work hard to get it right.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. Just around different areas, I think. Yeah, but.

But if we look at the children first, they see their parents divorce and then remarry, and then half of those children are going to say one of their parents divorce again. So they witness now the, dissolving of two marriages. So of course, they're growing up going, why would I get married? Why would I do this? They've seen their parents go through so much pain. But if we can turn that around and teach couples how to do this in a healthy way, that gives kids a new vision of what could be, I mean, that's kind of our.

Yeah, that drives a lot of our motivation.

Yeah. I call it our hairy audacious goal. Yeah. Yeah.

Reverse the divorce rate. Yeah.

So what's next for you guys. You're empty nesting. What do you, what do you what do you got on there. On your agenda for your life. Your marriage.

That's great. Yeah. We're we're, you know, we have a little bit of grieving going through the empty nest, period. Just as tough to launch that last one. And kind of sad, but, but this mission that we're on, to support blended families and help them through coaching community, our podcast, all of those things, it's it drives a lot of our passion in our marriage as well. Yeah. If we had a big dream, I don't know that we've said this publicly. We'd be hopping in an RV and driving around and meeting people and podcasting and mobility. That would be a really fun adventure for a couple of years, honestly.

Yeah.

Well, tell us about your podcast. Tell us about your your practice and how we find you. If we, if we want to get some support around the sprinter family situation.

Yeah, you can find us the on our website blended family breakthrough.com. Our podcast you can access same there. You can access it on all of the, all the streaming things on the place.

To see.

All the things. Yeah. All the places. Yeah. We've got, you know, quite a few episodes to choose from, but you can go in and pick a category or take the quiz and get kind of a curated list of what pertains to you so you don't get lost. And, you know, I think there's over 200 episodes now, so you don't get lost in all of it. You can figure out, oh, this is where I or this is where I'm struggling, and this is where I could use some help. Yeah. So it's it's a great way to learn, to grow, to consider new things that you hadn't thought about before. All those types of things. We love it when couples listen to the podcast together and talk about what they heard. That's that's a great way to continue growing and learning.

Yeah. And then, you ask, how do people connect and what do we do? Well, really easy way to connect number one on the website. You can go and schedule a free, free coaching call. You can put it on the calendar. We'll call you on the phone at that time, and we'll we'll, walk through whatever you're dealing with at that point in time. And then if we seem like partners, we're happy to help. And then I mentioned earlier our community, I think we got about 35, 40 couples in the community right now. And we do a couple, couple community meetings each month via zoom. And, just continue to support, all the couples in marriage and parenting and all the good stuff of my family.

I watch them support each other. And yeah.

That's really fun.

Yeah, absolutely. It's very cool.

I love it. Well, thanks so much for coming on the air, CB radio. I know this is going to be an episode people will want to hear flag and earmark because again, blended family situation is tough. I'm glad you guys are out there leading the charge and I'm glad to know you. So thanks for thanks for joining us and for sharing your wisdom.

Yeah. Thank you so much that.