Being A Step Father

How To Discipline Your Step Child As A Step Parent

We got somebody to take this picture of us on our first family trip, which was in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico a few years back.

Parenting one way or another is an arduous journey and a conundrum with a silver lining. I feel my story is a bit different but also I guess it's a cliche at the same time. Once you are a parent you have to learn how to troubleshoot your child’s needs; however I am troubleshooting my own problems every day of my life. When I met Khloe she was three about to turn four and now she is about to turn nine which I can’t believe. I met her after Fabiola and I had been dating for a few months and the one thing I never did was intervene with her parenting at the time, because I knew I had no jurisdiction in that department and I still kind of don’t. Whenever I was visiting Fab as I call her, at her parent’s house at the time, and if I saw Khloe doing something that I didn’t think she should be doing and if nobody noticed it, I would tell Fabiola and then she would come and take care of the situation. Looking through the glasses of parenting, my learning experiences taught me that when we become parents our brains become sponges again just like when we were kids. Our metaphorical tables turn ironically, because we almost become children and the children almost become the parents; they teach us and we learn from them. We consume a lot more information from them than we realize.
The most frustrating thing that has been for me is that even though I recognize that Khloe is not my biological child, I almost find that she is and I want to take part in the disciplining and I do more than I should. Everybody I know has told me that I need to stay out of those trenches, but at the same time I want to be part of her life and for some reason to me, that means to discipline Khloe. I have crossed the line in the sand a few times when it comes to disciplining and for me disciplining is almost like going into no man's land. Whenever I did cross the boundaries of the “d word” Fabiola would get upset at me which got to the point where she even told me that she felt like she would have to get mad at me so that I would learn to let her do the dirty work and that I should just focus on being the person Khloe can always rely on whenever she gets in trouble; I would be “the good parent.I have also heard from a few people that would say, “well if you can’t do any of the disciplining then what is the point of being a family?” Well in my rambunctious mind, both parties are right, but you have to find the medium in between. I know that I am allowed to do a little bit, but I am very conscious of the fact that the mother holds the reins of the child whether or not you are a step father or a biological father. What really helped me realize this was when I was one day in the dog house and I was being very hard on myself, and I managed to climb up out of my rut, went on YouTube and did some research. I came upon a trial lawyer whose concentration was in divorce and one of the things he said was that he had seen so many cases where the divorce was caused by the step parent crossing the boundaries of disciplining the child, and the most important thing you can do is to just love the child no matter what: that’s how you should mostly discipline a child.