Betty Carter: “Kiss the nuclear family goodbye.”
Jan 5th, 2008 by Jill
“[Betty] Carter advises stepfamilies to “kiss the nuclear family good-bye. Stepfamilies simply cannot draw a tight circle around the household in the same way that nuclear families do. That always excludes somebody.” The stepfamily’s task is to keep permeable boundaries around the household [and] to facilitate coparenting… “It’s a lot like tightrope-walking. “At the very time a stepfamily is trying to achieve its own integration, it has to keep the doors wide open and stay in touch with another household. You are not the lord of all you survey, as in the traditional family myth.” – Lessons from Stepfamilies, Psychology Today
