We recently had the opportunity to chat with Yvonne Kelly, Certified Stepfamily Counselor and co-founder (with her husband, Rick) of The Step and Blended Family Institute.  Yvonne talked about “step-dating”–a term used to describe singles, single parents, and dating couples with children in the mix who are contemplating a serious commitment.  She also discussed the importance of casual dating before step-dating, and what to consider before introducing your children to someone new.  Here’s part 1 of our interview with Yvonne:

CoPa101:  Your site is a great resource for people who visit CoParenting101 since not everybody who is co-parenting now is a step-parent, but that’s often the next step.  So I wanted to talk about how you made the transition from–I’m presuming–co-parenting, if you had children before, to step-parenting in a blended family.

Yvonne:  Well, actually that doesn’t apply in our situation because I didn’t have any children, but my husband had two daughters.   He was a widower, so he had two daughters, and his first wife had passed away, so he was on his own for four years, so in most cases you do have co-parenting going on either in one situation or the other, but in this situation, there really wasn’t that happening, but I work with a lot of folks who, of course, are trying to do that as well as move on and make a new life for themselves.  And so we were the blended family, and so after about probably into year five, we started having our own children as well, so Rick had two daughters. They were 14 and eight when we got married, and it was a great first year.  The whirlwind romance.  We knew each other from before.  We worked together and stuff like that, but it just became evident, shortly after we got married, that things changed, things shifted.  I think it was the permanence of it all, probably for the girls and me more, just what this is going to look like and what we had to do to accommodate each other and grow.

So I will never say after working with all the people that we’ve worked with that we had one of those most absolutely difficult situations. It was stressful certainly, and I felt very challenged by it.  I still say it was the greatest challenge of my life, but I knew that if I was dealing with this and struggling with it, and we were as a couple, that lots of other people had to be too.

After we had three children together, three boys, and I was embarking on going back into the workforce.  I realized that [supporting step- and blended families] was something that I wanted to do, and I was probably going to have to create it for myself.

That was a number of years ago, and there’s a lot of stuff out there now, but it’s taken time, and so we did some training with the Step Family Foundation in New York which has been around for years, since the ‘70s, and then we just decided that we were going to do this.  So, we set up the site and started seeing couples and families at our home.

Then, I really got more into offering the services through the website, finding a lot of people reaching out from all over the place, so phone coaching became the main way of working with people.  And recently, now that I’ve been doing this for a number of years, I’ve really come to see the benefit of working with people before they become a family, so it’s the people who are kind of in your camp who are moving along saying, “I want to date.  I want to eventually find someone to be with again.  I want to do it the right way.  I want to know that I’m going to be in a relationship really good for my kids and also continue to be able to co-parent effectively with my ex-partner.”

I’ve just done a teleconference on step-dating to remarriage recently.  To me, that is where the real work can be done to not only prevent future problems, but also just give people really good awareness of what they’re walking into.

My finding is a lot of people won’t change their mind if they’re in love and they want to have a relationship.  When they see those red flags, they’re like, “But we can do it.”

CoPa101:  Love conquers all.

Yvonne:  Love will conquer all, and everyone thinks that.  You know, it’s not like the folks who end divorced in a second marriage go back, “Oh, I knew we didn’t love each other enough.”  That’s not what happens.  Everybody starts off very optimistic and a bit naïve, so I work with those folks more, and it’s also really fun work.  People are excited.  They are enthusiastic, but if they want to be conscious as well, they are open to that, and the ones who come back to me two months or three months or a year down the road after being married say, “Oh, I’m so glad we did that.  I’m so glad we took the time to find out because even though it was perfect when we were dating, [and] it was great when we were getting married, a year into it, we started to see some things that were really problematic.  If we hadn’t known that that was to be expected, we would have really struggled even more than we did because we would have not known what to do.”

So it’s been a five-year evolution.  I still work a lot with couples who are already married with families, but I’m wanting to put a lot more effort into this [step-dating] group.  I was just reading [a statistic] recently about women and the likelihood of remarriage in the first five years and the first 10 years.  It’s almost a given that most people are going to get remarried.

So that requires some kind of thinking and planning and consciousness around, “Who do I want to be with?”  And I think sometimes we move the second time as unconsciously into the next relationship as we did the first time, so we’re really trying to get people to think about “What do I want?” and “How much time should I take for myself, for my kids to get them settled in this first huge life-altering transition before we start on something new.?”

Adults are sometimes more ready for that, but the kids aren’t. It’s hard for people to kind of pull in the reins and say, “Okay, we need to take a little more time here.”

CoPa101:  And timing is key.  One of the toughest questions is, “Now that I’m dating someone, when is the right time to introduce him or her to the children?” or if there are kids on both sides, introduce the kids to each other.  I feel like we [Mike and Deesha] have no credibility because we waited a really long time, like, years, before our kids met our significant others so I know people may think, “Look, I’m not going to wait years or a year,” but that’s what worked for us for a variety of reasons.

Yvonne:  And it obviously worked really well because you’re doing some great work together. That’s fabulous.

CoPa101:  That worked for us, but I know that that’s not always what other people want to do, so that question often stumps me when people say, “When is the right time?  How do you know it’s right?”  What are some of the things parents should consider in making that decision?  What advice do you give to that question?

Yvonne:  In the teleconference, I use a timeline, and it’s my own timeline and it’s kind of an eclectic collapsing of what I’ve learned and read and what obviously the divorce experts are saying–Gary Neuman [author of Helping Your Kids Cope with Divorce the Sandcastles Way] is one person I think of.  Really give yourself a year with your kids after a divorce, give yourself at least that much time for them really, even if you’ve been in a dead marriage for 10 years, and lots of people have.  And then they finally get on with it and move out and say I don’t want to live this life anymore, so they’ve maybe been ready for a new relationship for years.

CoPa101:  Right.

Yvonne:  But the kids aren’t.

CoPa101:  Right.

Yvonne:  There’s a day when [the kids] don’t think you’re dating, and then there’s a day that they know that you’re dating, and the whole world changes for them.  So it’s kind of the same for when people get divorced.  It’s a huge transition for them, and I think a lot of kids, even if they don’t talk about it, are fantasizing that mom and dad will get back together.

So, [I suggest] more time for the kids to see the two [parents] work things out post-divorce and being very clear.  In terms of the question when do you start dating, when do you start introducing you kids–essentially what we are saying is, take the time necessary for you to heal and figure out what went wrong and what you want in the next relationship, and we do a lot of conscious dating programs.

This is good for anyone.  It’s really intended for singles looking for a relationship that will fit their vision of their life, but I’ve kind of revamped it and built on it to be more for single parents who are looking to rebuild and have a new relationship and also the singles who are willing to date them.  They don’t have children because that’s a whole new reality too.  If you’re going to give yourself that time, and then you start to get out there and look around, and I think a lot of people feel like, “Okay, this time, I’ve got to find someone, and I can’t fool around because my kids are in the picture.  I can’t date different people.”

Well, we kind of say the opposite.  We’re saying even if you tell your kids every date that you go on, just say to them, “Look, I’m going to be dating.  I’ve given myself this amount of time.  I hope you guys are ready.  I hope you’re okay with that, but if you’re not, I understand that you might have some feelings about that.  Eventually mommy or daddy will be seeing other people, and I’m just going to get out there and start meeting some people and having some friendships.”

That way, you’re getting out there, and once you’ve already decided what you’re doing, what you want, and you’re spending time with different people because who finds the right person off the bat?  Nobody does.  So we say, do that “casual dating” thing.  Your kids are not a part of that, and don’t even have to have a lot of knowledge of it.  They might know you’re seeing friends and dating, and then when you find someone who you think you could be exclusive with, who you’d like to have to explore the relationship more, spend time with them.

Again, this doesn’t have to be someone that you’re introducing your children to.  You want to spend a bit of time with them, and we say three-to-six months, as long as it takes to really figure out, “This is someone that I think, based on what I know now even though it’s been a few months, could be someone that I would want to go to that next level with and involve my children with.”

What I find is that most people go out, they start looking, they find someone, they think they know that person, and the feelings are there, and then within a very short time, they’re introducing their children.  I don’t care what anyone says, when you start doing that, you want it to work because every step you take closer to getting into a serious relationship, the inclination is to not want to see the problems because you’ve already involved the children.

CoPa101:  Right, and you don’t want to disappoint them again, as with the divorce, and then that new person’s gone.  We called it the “potential revolving door” of our dating lives, and we agreed, at the time of our separation, to avoid exposing our daughters to it going forward, not knowing what life was going to look like for either of us.  That was one thing that we would not do, that sort of circle of people coming through.

Yvonne:  Someone wrote in or called into the teleconference and asked, “Should I be having different people pick me up at the door and when do I introduce?”  And I said, “Well, that can be really confusing for your kids to have different people.”  So, if you’re at that stage, that casual recreational dating stage, there’s no reason to involve your kids at all.  You go out for the evening, and they’re safe, or they’re with someone or when they’re not with you.  That’s the best time to actually do that kind of thing, so they don’t have to be dealing or struggling with that at all.

Really what they’re going to maybe or maybe not be ready for is getting used to the idea that you’ve found someone that you want to introduce to them.

In Part 2 of our interview with Yvonne, she’ll talk about what happens after the introductions are made–the co-parent’s reaction and the expectations of the new significant other.  Stay tuned…