Step by Step Parenting

When I was pregnant with my first, I prepared for motherhood as best I could. I read What to Expect the First Year. I researched all of the milestones I had to look forward to before my baby’s first birthday. I was prepared to track her development carefully, making sure to report any concerns to her pediatrician.

Then, as we entered the toddler years, everything changed, and I dove back into research mode. I read books on positive discipline, I designed a Montessori-style playroom, I thoughtfully picked all of my daughter’s board books and snacks and toys. In many ways, I loved the toddler years even more.

When I met my husband and we started dating, his oldest child was only a few years older than my daughter. It couldn’t be that big of a difference, right? In fact, it turned out to be fun! I was there for her first day of kindergarten, her running club practices and musical rehearsals and stage performances. I cried after her first grade open house, and I cried some more after her first day of second grade.

But at some point after that, things started to… change.

At first, I blamed myself, and I didn’t confide my feelings to anyone. I assumed I was struggling to parent my now-eight-year-old stepdaughter because she was my stepdaughter, and that was it. To admit to anyone that I was struggling felt like admitting that I was a bad stepmom.

Slowly, over time, I began to tell my husband how I felt. I made it abundantly clear that his daughter wasn’t the problem, but rather that I was struggling to parent his daughter. Without even letting him respond, I immediately started to blame myself again, reasoning that I must just be a bad stepmom or maybe it was the postpartum hormones or maybe I just wasn’t cut out to parent so many kids. But my husband stopped me before I could get all of that out. Then he admitted that he was struggling with some of the same feelings I was having, too.

We talked about how we missed the little five-year-old that loved to play dress up. We missed the little girl who was carefree, and happy all the time, eager to hold hands and dance to music in the kitchen and play with her younger siblings.

That little girl is still there, but she’s also grown, too. She likes her alone time now, and gets annoyed when her little siblings don’t give it to her. She’s more quiet, more reserved. She has begun to care what others think of her, not just her family, but friends and classmates, too.

For a while, it was easy to brush off all of these changes as simply the result of her parents’ divorce or of our relationship being different because I am her stepmom and not her mom. It wasn’t until I opened up about what I had noticed to her dad, discussed with her mom what her behavior was like during the weeks she wasn’t with us, and asked my mom what she remembered from parenting me when I was that age that I was able to have enough pieces to put together the puzzle.

Yes, some of what I was noticing and struggling with might have been the result of our family situation. But a lot of it, maybe even most of it, was simply signs of my stepdaughter leaving the little kid years and entering her tween years. Despite all of the literature out there on pregnancy, postpartum, babies, toddlers, and even preschoolers, I had read almost nothing about preteens and tweens. There’s just not as much out there, and nobody is exactly bringing it up at baby showers.

Normally, this would be the part of a post where I say, “BUT, here’s what I learned about!” But notice that the title says learning to parent big kids, not I learned to parent big kids. The truth is, I’ve only just begun to explore this part of parenting and I have absolutely no idea what the crap I’m doing.

What I do know is that effort matters with kids, whether they’re one, five, or eleven. I’m not going to get everything perfect — no parent does. I know that every kid, especially those going through huge changes like puberty and the tween years, needs patience, love, grace, and reassurance. I might be learning how to navigate this new phase of my child’s life, but they are learning how to navigate it, too; we can learn together.

And as parenting always goes, right as I figure out how to juggle it all and be the best mom to my kid for where they’re at in life… they will enter some new phase that’s foreign to both of us, and we can learn together all over again.