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Stepfamily integration and bonding with a stepchild is not something that adults can control. It takes time, perhaps two to three years, for stepfamilies to begin to think or act like a family. Genuine intimacy and affection in step relationships may take another five to six years to build up. In families with young children, where the adults actively work to bring the step family together, the integration time may get reduced to four years while in slow families; the time may extend to more than nine years. During the time of remarriage, most adults believe that the blending process will be much quicker and painless and cannot fathom the long duration that it might take.
We need to understand that there is complex family dynamics at work in a stepfamily, which take most adults by surprise. Restructuring family living arrangements after a divorce may just mean that family has spread over two or more households and thus emotional and relational dynamics get complicated. Stepfamilies mean that there are one or more additions to the family with whom you have to share your home and your children and stepchildren and your spouse and his or her family are all now part of your expanded family, at least as extended family kinships in the beginning. Then, there is the expanding family of your first husband or wife and your spouse’s former husband or wife’s family who may be in contact with one or all of you.
Then, stepfamilies integration may mean that you and your wife were married more than once and all the husbands or wives and their families may have some kind of connection with your immediate stepfamily. Then, there are scars caused by previous relationships that can affect the children and they may have been wounded deeply. Step relationships have to allow time to heal the wounds and then warming up to step parents and then finally, befriending them. This all takes a lot of patience and you have to be sensitive to the loss of your step children and what they might be going through to allow them the liberty of grieving instead of responding to your love and affection.