161: Growing Up Blended, and Navigating the Maze to Build Strong Blended Bonds

Episode Transcript

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Season 7, Episode 161: Growing Up Blended, and Navigating the Maze to Build Strong Blended Bonds

Guests:Jenni and Robert Lord

Air Date: April 7, 2025

Robert:So my dad remarried, and they actually never had children, but she was a stepmother to me and my sister. She is the greatest woman in the world. She has come into our family. She loves our children, so she’s a wonderful grandmother and I so much appreciate her and how she has taken care of my father and then just how she’s loved our kids. She is like a saint.

Ron:Welcome to the FamilyLife Blended podcast. I’m Ron Deal. We help blended families, and those who love them, to pursue the relationships that matter most. And why do we do that? Because we think there’s great joy in loving God and loving others and it brings a little peace to your corner of the world.

Were you there or did you miss it? Just two days ago we had a lot of people from all around the country, and a number of other countries, joining together for our ninth annual Blended and Blessed livestream. If you were streaming, boy, I pray it was a blessing to you. I hope you picked up a few nuggets that are going to help your family. And if you weren’t and you’re listening to this and you’re going, “Oh, I missed it,” well I got good news. You can get the All-Access Digital Pass, and you can watch the entire thing online at your leisure.

And yeah, if you’re a church or a ministry leader, you can use it as a small group tool. We make that available to you. Just look in the show notes. We’d love to get you connected to the Blended and Blessed All-Access Pass.

And that’s not all we have by the way. FamilyLife Blended is the largest blended family educational ministry in the world. We have more than a dozen books, video series like The Smart Stepfamily, live events, online events, the monthly Women in Blended Families livestream, a YouTube channel, leader training and coaching, this podcast, on and on it goes. We have all kinds of resources for you to read, watch, or listen to. Just dive in. We’d love to help.

Today we’re diving into a subseries on this podcast. We call it Growing Up Blended, and we come back to this theme again and again over time. If you’ll scroll back through our episodes, you’ll find a number of Growing Up Blended in the title. What we do is we just talk with a now adult who grew up in a stepfamily and we listen to their stories. And here’s the point; helping you know what it’s like to be a kid in a stepfamily. I mean, everybody’s journey is different, but in some ways they’re pretty much the same.

So listening to someone else’s story might help you love the child or the stepchild in your world, in your story. That’s the point. So in this edition of Growing Up Blended, we’re adding just a little twist. Usually I’m talking with one person, but today I’m going to be talking with Robert and Jenni Lord, who both grew up in a blended family and then they married each other. Robert and Jenni, thanks for being with me today.

Robert:Thanks for having us, Ron. We appreciate it.

Ron:Yeah, let me just tell our audience a little bit about you guys. Jenni, you’re the founder and CEO of Chosen, an organization committed to empowering parents in adoptive families and foster care situations. You facilitate recovery of children from trauma. By the way, to our listener, I interviewed her about parenting foster and adoptive kids in episode 150, so if you missed that, you might want to go back and check it out. And Robert is joining us today. Robert, as I understand it, you run a healthcare staffing company, is that right?

Robert:That’s correct.

Ron:The two of them have four children and live in Texas. Again, thanks for being with me today. Here’s my first question. I am sure you guys have talked a little bit about your blended family childhood stories somewhere in the course of marriage. You’ve been married, what, 20 years, something like that?

Jenni:Almost 20.

Robert:Yes, we’re coming up on 20.

Ron:Alright, so somewhere in these 20 years, I know you’ve told a story or two to one another just about your lives growing up. You’ve interacted with one another’s extended family. I’m curious from your standpoint, what was sort of similar about your childhoods growing up in your blended family situations and what was different about it?

Robert:So interestingly enough, enough, we kind of grew up in the same culture. I grew up in Oklahoma. She grew up in West Texas, but our towns kind of have a similar vibe to them. Not big metropolitan areas, but not super small towns, and both grew up in the same type of church. My parents divorced when I was young, when I was about four. Hers was maybe a little bit after that.

Jenni:Third grade.

Robert:Yeah, I feel like we just had a very similar upbringing, similar path, similar culture of our town, our churches.

Jenni:Yeah, I think there was a lot of similarities in where we came from in terms of family values and like Rob said, the church culture. Neither set of parents had a lot of means, and so that certainly shaped us and how we view the world.

One of the things that was very different was I was the oldest of two biological brothers. I have an adopted brother who came into our family when I was a teenager, but at the time I was the oldest and only girl, and he’s second born. I think that shaped our experiences very differently in being in a blended family.

Ron:Yeah. Can you say a little bit more about that? How did it shape him differently?

Jenni:Well, I won’t speak for him, but I’ll just tell my perspective. We chatted about this last night. I was the oldest and only girl. I was about nine the first time my parents divorced. They actually got back together and divorced again. And I think I helped with my brothers after school and tried to get the chores done, and I took on a burden of responsibility that was not necessarily mine to take, but understandable that I just wanted to be the helper and certainly felt like I was in charge when I was home and he didn’t have that experience, not being first and a girl, right?

Robert:Yeah, for sure.

Ron:Yeah. So Robert, I want to get to yours in just a second, but Jenni, say a little bit more about that. So oldest daughters often sort of get pulled up into the parenting system, if I could say it that way, in a single parent home. I’m curious, so mom’s house, dad’s house, did you have a similar role in both places, or just one compared to the other?

Jenni:That is such an interesting question. I don’t know that I’ve really reflected on it at my dad’s because we lived with my mom and so we were with her most of the time. We saw my dad every other weekend. Back then, they didn’t really have this midweek kind of check-ins or whatever, so we didn’t do that. So it just felt different when you’re going to visit every other weekend. Because my dad wasn’t working, he was with us and so probably did not have that same feeling of being in charge or being responsible like I did at my mom’s house.

Ron:Yeah, that’s really interesting because, and I think it’s common that kids have different roles in different homes. There’s different dynamics going on in those homes. Sometimes one of the parents has recoupled, and so you do have two adults, one parent, one stepparent in a particular home. And so you may not have to as a child, be as responsible for as many things as you are in the other home.

And you just mentioned time and how different that is and availability, the proximity of your dad being available. It was a weekend; he was more visible or there. I don’t know how hands-on he was, but still it made a difference in you and whether or not you felt the, would you call it a burden or just a responsibility or how did you experience that?

Jenni:I don’t recall feeling a burden. I think when I processed it as an adult, I just realized I absorbed this feeling of wanting to be in control. There’s a lot of factors that growing up where I did not feel a sense of control and so I think the responsibility helped me feel some sense of control. And so I do think there’s a burden to that. I didn’t process it in childhood as a burden.

Ron:And that makes a lot of sense, especially that a lack of safety, you experience some things not stable. And so finding control, sort of being in charge of life in whatever ways you can, that’s a common thing that kids experience when they go through hard, hard transitions, unwanted transitions. You want to try to reestablish as much control as you possibly can. My guess is, Jenni, that cuts both ways for you as an adult; that you naturally can jump in and take charge of situations and maybe there’s times when you don’t know when to not take charge. I’m curious, how would you answer that?

Jenni:Yeah, that is a great observation. Well, there’s a reason Little Miss Bossy was my favorite book in third grade. I took inspiration from it. I’ve had to learn in leadership to tame that being the boss is not all it’s cracked up to be and being a leader is very different. But in my home, certainly there’s been an adjustment over almost two decades together of learning to let go of some of that control and not needing to manage all of the details of the home. And that was certainly a journey in our marriage.

Rob traveled a lot when we were first married for seven or eight years, and so I was in charge when he was gone. And so then even making adjustments when he came back to just make space for him to lead. And he’s a different leader than I am.

Ron:Yeah, yeah, I mean that just sounds like life to me right there. I mean, that’s every couple in the world. We all carry something from our childhoods into our marriage, some style or manner or how we go about doing things. In particular when we’re feeling uncertain about life. And for you, control was a way to sort of get that certainty back and it’s very functional until it’s not. Until new relationships require new things, and we’ve got to learn how to grow beyond where we were. I mean, that is absolutely my journey, Nan’s journey in our marriage, and I think that’s a very common one.

So Robert, I’m curious what you’re thinking or feeling right now, having listened to this half of the conversation so far.

Robert:Yeah, I understand how we become the people that we become from the experiences that we were a part of throughout our life. And my wife is an amazing lady and she’s done very well to manage in the right way to healthy part of her life from the experiences that she came from.

So we all have to do that. We all have to come to grips with our childhood, how we’re raised, what our parents did to us, and the traumas that we had along the way, and we give those to God, and we help each other as partners. We get good community around us, and we use those seemingly traumas and weaknesses in our life to be strengths. So I’ve seen that in my wife for sure.

Ron:Yeah, that’s pretty great. I’m curious, do you have an equivalent what she was talking about that she carried into adulthood and marriage?

Robert:No, not at all. I was born in California. My parents divorced when I was four. Both of my parents are from Oklahoma. My mom moved back to Oklahoma with us and then my father moved to Puerto Rico, and so we didn’t see him on the weekends, but we did see him over the summertime. And so it was just a different experience, and we had about two months with him during the summer. And then my mom remarried, and it was difficulty with my stepdad and my sister, so my sister left and went to live with my dad. So that was kind of our experience.

Ron:Wow, that’s a loss. Sort of another phase for you. So there’s a big earthquake in California called divorce, and then it leads to a lot of change, moving physically, not being able to see dad as often or as much. And I don’t know, maybe that sort of was fine with you to just see him a couple of months out of the year. Maybe you missed him the other time, I don’t know.

Robert:Yeah, I mean I was four years old, so I do remember crying a lot initially. Where’s dad, where’s dad? And seeing him leave, but then it just becomes your normalcy. It becomes your life. Like dad lives in another place and I live with mom.

Ron:And you settle into it if you’re like most kids, and I’ll throw this to both of you. If you’re like most kids, you do settle into whatever the realities are of your circumstance post-divorce or post death of a parent, but it doesn’t mean you like it, and it doesn’t mean you don’t have a twinge in your heart from time to time of sadness because you’re living it, but boy, you wouldn’t choose it. How did you carry that?

Robert:Well, my wife talks with me about this all the time, and this may be just because I’m a guy, but I never really processed that. It was just my life. It was just my experience. I didn’t have anything else to compare it to, “Oh, my life would’ve been like this or not like this.” It’s just your life. There’s some parts of your life that you really like and there’s some parts of your life that you don’t like, and you just have to manage that as you grow up.

And I think on my side, I think my parents cooperated much more than my wife’s side, which made it easier for me. I never saw my parents fighting or really talking bad about the other one. And so I just had a little life with dad and a little life with mom. That’s how I saw it.

Ron:Yeah.

Jenni:I think, Ron, what I would say about Rob is, and his friends would echo this, he’s an eternal optimist. He grew up with a mom who was, I mean, she was his biggest champion, still is to this day and so there was a little bit of insulation from just that environment and then his personality. One of the common factors, in addition to just being from similar towns, one of the things that was most stable for both of us was we had very strong friend groups.

So even though there was some chaos and instability around us in family situations from young ages, we both had really solid friends that we’re close with to this day. And that was very grounding for me, and that’s just a similar thing that we’ve learned about each other that we really appreciate.

Ron:It sounds like that community resource, those friends, and the stability that came with that was kind of filled some gaps in some ways for you guys.

Robert:Well, good and bad.

Ron:As usual; friendships are.

Robert:We haven’t got into this, but there’s chaos when your parents are divorced. And in my case, I lived with my mom, and she did as well, but there just wasn’t a lot of parental boundaries, at least not for me. Once I hit junior high or middle school, really could do whatever we wanted. I did have a stepdad at that time, but we didn’t have a great relationship, but I had friends that we did everything together. I mean, they’d come over to my house after school. I mean they would sleep at our house even on school nights and just finding that community and then you go through these experiences with your friends and those experiences create bonds and just self-worth really, that maybe you’re lacking from your family.

Ron:Yeah, and good and bad. I’m curious about the lack of boundaries stuff. For a lot of people when you’re a kid and you have free reign, you love that, you love the freedom to go and do and hang out and stay up late or whatever it is that people like to do. That usually comes to a head when they become parents and they start realizing, “Okay, do I want to raise my kids the way I was raised, or do I think they need more boundaries than I had?” I’m curious, Robert, first for you, what was that like?

Robert:So I’ll say whenever I was at my dad’s house, I mean there were more rules and it was different than when I was at my mom’s house, but whenever I became an adult. I mean, the beauty is that Jenni and I, we came into marriage saying we’re never going to divorce.

And so as we’ve raised our kids, I’ve never done it in an environment without her. And so we’ve raised our kids together and she has strengths when it comes to parenting our kids. I have different strengths. We all have our own weaknesses, but I’ve never thought about—well, you do think about it, but when you’re growing up and just the liberty, I actually want my kids to have a little bit more liberty honestly than sometimes they—life is just different. You can’t play out all night long. Our society has changed a lot, so I don’t know if that helps.

Ron:Yeah, it does.

Jenni:I would say so. I’ll talk about myself first and then talk about us together. We already talked a little bit about, I was striving to find control when I was young and my parents, my biological parents, their parenting styles were very different. And I had multiple stepparents, and so that also changed the dynamics at certain times. But I knew that I wanted my kids to have more boundaries than I did, and I swung the pendulum too far, honestly, the other direction.

And really until I learned through the work that I do, working with families who have experienced trauma and understanding how important it is to pursue connection first before correction, pursuing the hearts of our kids. And that was an adjustment for me because my strategies when my kids were young were more controlling and correcting and I had to really shift gears several years into parenting and we tend to blend each other out.

Ron:So yeah, sort of cancel one another out. You’re one way and he’s the other way, that sort of thing,

Jenni:Not cancel—

Robert:Hopefully in a positive way.

Jenni:I would say compliment, Ron, not cancel.

Ron:Compliment; alright, good, good.

Jenni:Where he probably is naturally geared towards just, I like to say he’s not type A or type B, he’s C, so he’s not even on the spectrum. He is just laid back and I’m not as laid back and together that gives our kids a sense of boundaries, but also nurturing and patience. He’s more patient than I am and so I think we just have balanced each other out in a way that is probably healthy and different than how we grew up.

Ron:What I love about this is for somebody who’s listening or watching and they’re thinking about their children, their stepchildren and plugging themselves into their shoes and imagining what it is to be a kid with you as the parent or stepparent. And it’s sort of like, yeah, fast forward life a little bit for them. Someday do you want them parenting the way you parent? Is there that balance or is there not? Are you still sort of reacting out of your own childhood or reacting out of the circumstances that brought you into this blended family?

And so you’ve either gone no boundaries at all or complete control—you’re going to run every element of their life. And it just sort of put that in perspective as you fast forward their worlds knowing that they’re going to carry this with them. Maybe there’s some adjustments that need to be made in how you’re parenting or stepparenting, maybe there’s not, but it’s just good to sort of do that fast forward that you guys have had, that you’ve lived.

And by the way, kudos to you for making adjustments and making changes and working together as a team and playing to your strengths. I think a lot of times people sort of just get stuck in how they were raised. “That’s how I’m going to do it,” and they don’t think there’s any need to adjust.

Robert:Yeah. Ron, I would say that the biggest difference between how we were raised and how we raise our kids is, or really our commitment in our marriage, that we’re not going to raise our kids in a divorced family. And that makes all the difference. I know that divorces happen but just being able to provide stability to our kids because we’re committed to our marriage. I think that’s just a big difference that we never had in our upbringing.

Ron:I just want to add onto that for our listener. Your kids may have already been through a divorce, but you’re now in a marriage and you can have a commitment to this relationship to provide the same level of stability that Robert’s talking about. And yes, there’s a backstory and yes, there’s repercussions and things that you have to deal with and so do they, but your commitment to make this marriage last has a lot of stabilizing influence in their world and in their lives. And to me, there’s a lot of hope for that. I want our listener to catch that because that’s really important.

Robert:Can I give you one example?

Ron:Yes, please.

Robert:So my dad remarried. He was in Puerto Rico. He found a Puerto Rican woman and they remarried. And so she’s been in his life, what? 40—

Jenni:Thirty-five years.

Robert:—35 years and they actually never had children, but she was a stepmother to me and my sister. But she is the greatest woman in the world. She has come into our family, she loves our children, so she’s a wonderful grandmother. And so I so much appreciate her and how she has taken care of my father. I mean, that’s huge to see another woman come into your life but really honor and take care of your parent. And then just how she’s loved our kids. She is like a saint.

Jenni:Truly.

Ron:That’s really great and that is encouraging, and we believe in that around here; that stepparents can have tremendous impact and influence. Sometimes the road to get to that impact is a little bit longer for some than it is for others. In fact, I’m curious, Robert, when she first came into your life, did you think she was great? Was there a little transition there for you?

Robert:Yeah, so I was 11 years old, and I did think that she was great. So my mom remarried sooner than my father, and so I knew that my mom had already moved on. And I think at that point maybe I was fine with my dad remarrying, can’t quite remember, but I know that there is that sense of jealousy. “You’re never going to be my mom” or “You’re never going to be my dad” with the stepparent. But I think I was fine with it. She always treated me well. And so they got married in Puerto Rico and then quickly moved to Maryland. That’s where they live now. And so it just seemed like once we were in Maryland, that was like our family.

Ron:And you have a brother or sister, you said, sister.

Robert:I have an older sister.

Ron:Yes. And how was her adjustment to the stepmother?

Robert:So when my dad married my stepmother, my sister and I were still living during the school year with my mother, so we weren’t living with my dad full time, but I think she still got along well with my stepmom. She had more difficulty getting along with my stepfather.

Ron:Yeah, let’s loop back around to that little piece. The reason I’m asking is just because again, it’s good for the listeners I think, to think about the sibling group that your children are a part of because sometimes within one or two brothers, sisters—sometimes there’s three or four kids in a household—one gets along great with the stepparent, another one has a really hard time, and the other two are sort of like in between.

Robert:Yeah, for sure.

Ron:Each child has their own personality, their own journey, and sometimes there’s a dynamic there where if one person really has a hard time, it’s sort of like the other backs off, doesn’t want to find themselves in the same conflicts and so they’re more amicable and more—so even as I’m talking through that, Jenni, I’m wondering for you, did your parents go on and recouple? And what was that transition like for you and your siblings?

Jenni:Yes, they did. They recoupled a couple of times at least. My dad remarried first. That was a short marriage, and it was difficult. The stepmom at the time had conflict with my brother that was right under me, and she wanted to be my friend.

So I was like 12 and trying to make sense of accepting this woman and her children and keep peace because she didn’t get along super great with the brother right under me, so I was sensitive to those dynamics. My mom got remarried, and he had a child, and both of those marriages were short. And so I don’t remember a lot of the details about the emotional dynamics with the first stepdad. And then my mom got remarried again when I was in high school, and my dad got remarried again when I was about a freshman in college. And he has been remarried to his wife for about 30 years now. So similar to Rob.

My kids have another nana that has been in my life for 30 years. She had children that I had known growing up and so she felt safe to me, I think. And one of the commonalities between our dads and their wives is in my experience, and from what Rob’s told me and certainly what I’ve witnessed from Abalita—we call her Abalita—they didn’t try to take the place of our moms. They were respectful of having a different place. They didn’t overpower our dads, I think, in making decisions for us, and we just saw unity in their marriages that I think was super healthy.

I have a lot of respect for stepparents. Some of my best friends are stepparents, and I’ve had a bird’s eye view to the challenges that come with co-parenting. But I do think honoring the first mom place has been powerful in our lives.

Ron:And I would agree with that. And anybody who listens to our podcast knows you just nailed it. That is so very important because it feels like a threat to the child when you try to move into very special spaces in their heart. And the mom space and the dad space are very, very special and protected. And so if you try to step in there, oftentimes you just get the stiff arm and push back in a way. And so it makes you more safe, more approachable when you recognize the limits of your role.

And one other thing I’ll just add, and I’d love for you guys to react to this because you both had, at least in your dad’s case, a marriage, Jenni, for the second one that lasted, and it was significant, and they seemed to get along and honor one another and take care of each other. For a child who has been through hard unwanted transition and change—Jenni, I’m even thinking how this merges with foster kids and adoptive kids—to finally be in a situation where there is a happy couple heading the household, leading the household, providing some stability in their world, they may not like a lot of things about what’s happened in their lifetime, but at least that’s one thing they don’t have to worry about.

Jenni:Yeah, I think for me, when my dad got remarried to his current wife, I saw him happy, and it actually made space for us to bring some healing into our relationship because I didn’t grow up around him for about half of my childhood, other than every other weekend. This is one of the things I’ve observed in our parenting, the perspective that I can give to Rob about some of the emotional context and that are at play, the emotional dynamics that are at play with our kids and their teenage brains.

Well, my parents didn’t have that for each other, and so I had a lot of conflict with my dad as a teenager, and I think it would have looked differently if he had my mom or a stepparent who could say, “Hey, this is some of the things that are really important to a teenage girl.” Like this is normal developmental. And we just had a lot of conflict. And so when he got remarried and he was happy, there was just space for us to talk about some of that conflict and work through some of what was in the rear-view mirror.

Ron:Yeah. Oh man, that’s so good. That’s so good. I’m curious, Jenni, so dad’s first remarriage, mom’s first remarriage, didn’t work well, came to an end. I’m curious, that next layer of relationship, was it a little bit harder for you to give yourself into that, to trust it given that there had already been some difficulty with the previous stepparents?

Jenni:A hundred percent.

Ron:Say more about that.

Jenni:I think this goes back to some of the environment and being uncertain about, is this really going to last? That was a question in my mind, “Is this really going to last?” And so I was seeking out control in my environment for bracing for the unknown. And again, I don’t really think I did voice some of that hesitancy when I was a teenager. Certainly shared that with my parents, but I didn’t really fully process how that affected me and some of the wounds that came with that until I was an adult. And that’s been a process.

Ron:Yeah, I imagine so. In fact, I was just sitting here thinking all challenging experiences in life leave a little residue on us, on our heart, and it just gets in the way of new attachments, new relationships, how we give ourselves and what we expect of ourselves, what we expect of others. Can you pinpoint one thing, Jenni, that just sort of like, here’s an example of the residue that left on me as I grew up maybe in your current marriage, family, parenting. I don’t know. Is there an example that stands out?

Jenni:Yes. One of the things I think probably not necessarily my personality, like hardwired DNA, but my environment, I think one of the things that, the ways that it shaped me was I became an internal processor. So I would internally process what was going on in my environment, what levers to pull or not pull. And I just processed a lot internally and it put me somewhat in a self-preservation mode, just self-protecting, not wanting to get hurt, not wanting to be hurt.

I just recently wrote about this. Self-preservation I feel like the Lord, it’s a lifetime of undoing. It’s just shedding layers. And so part of coming into our marriage, and this still is at play at times where my go-to default is just to process internally and not necessarily look to him to process and talk through things. And that can be a challenge because I want to, it’s just not natural. So I have to work to talk through things.

Ron:I think what I hear you saying is that for you, even processing out loud with your husband is a risk. It’s an act of courage, whereas for other people, they might feel more comfortable doing that. You naturally have to sort of push yourself into that space.

Jenni:Yeah, so he’s safe. I know he’s safe, but there was a lot of years of not feeling psychologically safe that just kind of shut me down emotionally. So I’m still working through some of that residue.

Ron:Yeah, that’s good. Robert, how about you? Any residue you can think of?

Robert:Any residue.

Ron:Just something you’ve run into and you’re like, “Yeah, I know where that comes from.”

Robert:What do you think? I mean, she probably has about four or five on the list for me.

Ron:She could list them quickly.

Robert:I just don’t really process those things like that. I don’t know. I’m very sensitive. I don’t want to get off into a whole nother topic, but I’ve had friends who have now gone through divorce and now have a blended family. I’m just very sensitive of when the relationship breaks down and it’s not going to work. Being protective of the kids and being an adult. And you can fight through, you can manage any type of relationship. You can get divorced peacefully and move on with your life.

But so many of my friends have been caught up in these battles and their kids are in the middle of it, and the kids are used as pawns. And I don’t know, I mean, I wasn’t used like that much, but I’ve become very sensitive to that and try to help my friends through that.

Ron:Yeah. Well that’s really understandable. And I’m sitting here thinking about the work that Jenni does, and I know you’re a supporter of that, where she’s advocating for kids that get lost through adoption, foster care, new families, transitions. How do we help make that work for those children? I just think that’s very noble, and I love the way it sounds like your guys’ experiences have informed that journey for you and your desire to help other people. Has that been something you’ve been aware of?

Jenni:Oh, absolutely. I think my drumbeat is healthy relational connections. I referenced that earlier, teaching parents how to pursue their child’s hearts. And recently somebody asked me, “Well, what is healthy relational connection?” And it kind of stopped me in my tracks because when I talk about it, people are like, “Oh yeah.” We instantly have a frame of reference of, what does that mean to have healthy relational connections?

But it is important to define it. And I would say it like this, and certainly my, not just my background with my brother adopted out of foster care, but in my own childhood, healthy relational connection, it really starts with being seen, heard, and valued. And kind of to what Rob’s saying is sometimes in the middle of stepparenting and broken households, kids get lost in the shuffle of they’re just absorbing whatever environment that they’re in. We just say how kids are so resilient and there’s—I hesitate to use that language and endorse that language strongly.

I think resilience is built over time, but kids just absorb the environment that they’re in. And sometimes in my own experience, not feeling heard or what I had to say was valued, that had an effect on me. And it’s important with blended families and in our families that are still intact, is making sure that kids feel seen, valued, and heard, and making space for that. And that takes time. It just takes time.

Ron:That’s a good word. Robert, Jenni, thank you so much for being with me today and sharing your lives with our audience.

Jenni:Thank you.

Robert:Yeah, thanks for having us.

Ron:Let me say to our listener, viewer, if you want to learn more about Chosen and the work that Jenni does with foster and adoptive families, check the show notes. You can learn more.

And I’m just going to throw this in here. It’s a thought, actually, The Mindful Marriage book that we released in January, this residue that we all carry, this book is going to help you in the journey to discover what that is, to put words on it and to connect how it relates to your current relationships and to reveal honestly how it shows up in your moments of dysregulation when you’re feeling challenged, unloved, unsafe in relationships. And really, I think you’ll be surprised as I was and as I am in an ongoing basis of how powerful that dynamic that residue really is in our current lives and relationships. And if you really want to chase that, if maybe today’s conversation has awakened you to something there that you want to pursue, I’m going to recommend The Mindful Marriage as a resource to help you on that journey.

Well, in case you didn’t know, FamilyLife® is a donor supported ministry. I just want to remind you of that. We really can’t do what we do without you. Some of our supporters give monthly, others just make a one-time gift. Everything is tax deductible, and we certainly appreciate it.

I’m Ron Deal. Thanks for listening or watching. And thank you to our production team and donors who make this podcast possible.

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