Okay. Let me sit with you here for a minute, because this one is genuinely hard, and I want you to feel that I understand the complexity before I say anything clinical.
Blended families are some of the most emotionally loaded systems I work with. There is no roadmap, there is no instruction manual, and everyone is operating on different timelines of grief, loyalty, and trust.
So let me ask you first: which seat are you sitting in?
If you are the biological parent watching this happen:
You are caught in the middle of two people you love, and that is an exhausting place to live. Here is what I see in my office constantly. The biological parent often knows something feels off, but minimizes it because they want the family to work. They want to believe in the vision of “us all being okay.”
That minimizing? It costs you. And it costs your kid.
Your child is watching to see if you will protect them. Not because your partner is a villain. But because protection is how children learn they matter. When you stay silent, even from a loving place, your child registers it as abandonment.
You need to have a direct conversation with your partner. Not a battle, but a clear one. Something like: “I need you to come to me first before correcting my child. Not because you don’t matter, but because we have not built that trust with them yet. This is something we build together, slowly.”
If you are the stepparent:
I am going to be honest with you, because that is what I do.
You are probably doing it from love. You see something that needs addressing, you care about this child, and you are trying to be a real part of this family. I believe that.
And. You are moving faster than the relationship can hold.
Trust with a stepchild is not assigned by marriage or by love. It is earned through time and through the child feeling genuinely seen by you, not corrected by you. The moment you step into a disciplinary or boundary-setting role before that trust exists, the child does not hear your love. They hear a threat to their loyalty to their biological parent.
Think of your role in the early years less as a parent and more as a really important adult in their life. Like a beloved coach or mentor. You influence through relationship, not authority.
The couple piece, because this is always a couple issue:
Here is what I have not heard you say yet, but I bet is underneath all of this: the two of you are not aligned. And that misalignment is what is actually breaking things.
One of you feels undermined. One of you feels criticized. And neither of you is talking about the real thing, which is probably something like: “Do you trust me? Do you think I am a good parent? Do you have my back?”
That is the conversation that actually needs to happen. The stepparent boundary stuff is real and it matters, but it is often the surface of a much deeper question about belonging, loyalty, and whether you two are genuinely on the same team.
You cannot get there until you stop fighting about who was right in the last incident and start asking: “What does this family actually need from us together?”
That is the work. And it is worth doing.
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Figs is a licensed marriage and family therapist with 16+ years of experience working with couples. He’s the co-founder of Empathi, host of the “Come Here to Me” podcast, and author of an upcoming book on relationships and the systems that shape how we love.
Read more: Co-Parenting After Divorce: What to Expect from Counseling
