Becoming a Parent-in-law - a life transition
By Dan and Mari Greenwood
Couples Need Family And Friends
The best ingredients in family life between generations are:
- friendship
- listening
- understanding
- respect and acceptance
- affirmation
- support
- encouragement
all happening both ways between adult individuals.
However families are often far apart geographically, making it difficult to maintain quality personal contact. Also beliefs, values and interests may be very different in each ‘wing ‘ of the family. People differ to in their fundamental views about ‘What are the people in my life there for?’
Couples vary greatly in their desire to maintain their pre-marriage friendships and to build up new friendship networks through their neighbourhood, work, church, leisure interests and children’s schools.
For many young people friends can be both more interesting and safer than ‘family’. With new friends you get a new start, free from your past and free from expectations and obligations.
The parents and parents-in-law who have young families with strong beliefs in love and loyalty are greatly blessed.
Some of us, as parents and parents-in-law, are greatly influenced by our own parents’ and in-laws’ values, views, traditions, behaviour and expectations.
We may be convinced that the ‘good’ aspects of these must, at any cost, be repeated in our own family lives,
Or we may be doing all we can to avoid repeating inappropriate attitudes and behaviour, which we have found unhelpful from our own parents.
POINT TO PONDER -
- Can friendship with our offspring and their spouses continue to grow after marriage and what is needed to make that happen?
- Is it perhaps difficult for one partner to accept the friendship the other partner has with his/her parent(s)? (This may happen if their friendship with their own parents has not developed well in the years before their marriage?)
- What do we do if we feel redundant because the young couple’s friends are providing all that they need in interest, companionable activities, meals, babysitting, child-care, and emotional support?
- On the other hand might we wrongly encourage the younger couple to become too dependent on us? Might they take too much advantage of willingness to cook, shop, house-sit, care for children?
- How will we find the right balance?
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