Blended Family: All families, blended families included, have rules, limits, laws and ways of enforcing family rules. 

Family Site Since 1997

Blended Family: The laws of the clans or the family rules. All families have ways of enforcing rules, limits, and the laws of their clan.

Rules are limits on what we can and can't do in a family. Every family knows its own rules.

Taube Kaufman in her book The Combined Family says that enforcing rules (limits) is one of the most important functions of parents.

She writes, "Limits serve as boundaries, like the walls in a room. They can be bounced against, but they will remain standing. It is these same kinds of boundaries, or limits, that children need while they are growing up."

Rules are internalized and affect  our behavior and feelings long after we have left home. Some rules may prevent a family from functioning as well as it can. 

For example: A rule to suppress anger does not keep people from becoming angry. But it does assure that any one who shows anger in a family setting has broken the family rule.

Other rules which were once necessary or appropriate remain in place far past their usefulness. Families strive to maintain the status quo. This perpetuation gives the family strength and the security of continuity by telling us who we are and why.

Status quo can also be stagnating. We need both innovations and maintenance of the status quo.

Families remain forever caught between the inevitability  of change and the resistance to that change.

Divorce or death, of course, is a major family change.

Families usually  view divorce as the end of the family and some view death in the same  manner. However, that is not so.

The family endures. It changes, some of the rules even change, but it endures.

Even in divorced. blended or widowed families, there are dynamics that continue. Single parent families operate in many of the same ways that two parent families do.

More information about blended families.

Children (including adult children) can not walk away from their family,  whatever the family form, anymore than they can walk away from society itself.

The family is basically a very conservative institution with a vast    amount of staying power. If we are separated from our family, we find groups that allow us to play our same family roles. 

The family will persevere.

Additional information about your blended family.

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