Cathy Cress

Expert in Aging Life and Geriatric Care Management

5 Steps To Include Step Siblings and Half Siblings in Holiday Gatherings

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Are your midlife stepsiblings or half siblings going to be at the coming Hanukkah or Christmas ? Maybe you expect acid reflux from the hot sauce that parental divorce dribbles on family celebrations.

 Rituals like Hanukkah or Christmas events are the glue that bond family life. They patch up family and sibling disputes and give us the architecture of a year full of celebrations marking family history. Rituals are the touchstones for rites and family passages and keep us gathering over and over again to celebrate and observe those landmarks. Rituals also give form to every day we spend and are the counterpoints of the turning clock when the family can gather and talk, share and gossip.

 But the tidal wave of divorce among baby boomers and Generation X brought step siblings with old grudges, half siblings who lost family love, ½ their rooms, and gained a shredded family nest. Now the family does not know who it’s members really are and rituals like Hanukkah or Christmas – can turn into a nightmare.

 This is true especially for aging parents, who may be at the Hanukkah or Christmas event, don’t need the drama and will need all of you to be a family team when they need care as they decline.

Here are some tips to include everyone including step siblings and half siblings

 

  1. Call everyone ahead of time. Invite them and ask everyone to bring a dish. That is the beginning of building a family team- sharing
  2. Don’t make this a family meeting where old sibling grudges get hashed out. Celebrations are just that. If someone pushes you button, keep that angry response to yourself and maybe arrange a future family meeting.
  3. Schedule a Family meetings can be planned post Hanukkah or Christmas with a Aging Life Care Manager or a mediator’s help.
  4. Reinvent your Hanukkah or Christmas get-together through a new twist that really makes an effort to includes step and half siblings and glue that jagged bond. Create activities that everyone can join -– blood, step, or half siblings.

 

  1. Check ahead and find out what everyone likes to do. If they are step kids or stepsiblings make sure you have fun things to do ahead of time that they enjoy. Make sure everyone is an included, especially new member of the family like young stepsiblings who may feel like third wheels in your clan. If they have a difficult time blending (most do) – reach out to make them part of the group. Understand their reluctance to join an existing blood family where they have bloody history or a nasty Cinderella nightmare tale. Bring them up to the top floor of the castle.

Gathering for ritual occasions like Hanukkah or Christmas or any holidays, allows you to spend time together as a family and gives kids their siblings the tools to solve problems, negotiate and compromise and learn the skills of working together as a group.

 

Ritual gatherings with step half and blood siblings can build those bonds, so future sibling, ” I Hate You stories”, are not created in the here and now whether siblings are is half, blood, or step.

Check out my book Mom Loves You Best for more tips on sibling inclusion.

 

 

 

Dread Memorial Day with Midlife Sibings?

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Are you dreading the Memorial Day family barbeque?  . Will your estranged brother be manning the barbeque while you drink too much beer?

Are you a midlife sibling at war with sister or brother? Worse than that, do you feel like you and all your siblings are in not only a dysfunctional family but also an aging dysfunctional family?

What’s an aging dysfunctional family? Well they are very much like a war zone. Clans remain at war with each other, like the 1980’s Serbian conflict or the Iraq war pitting the Sunni’s against the Shia.These tribal battles have gone on for centuries and have the same bloody roots of the dysfunctional family -repeated from one generation to the next.

The hallmarks of the dysfunctional aging family, are after decades as a motley clan there is still not enough love in the family. The now midlife children have to fight for what little nurturance their older parents can bring to the ancient rickety nest they built.

Nurturing is often missing in the dysfunctional aging family because the aging parents themselves probably got little nurturing themselves as kids and on and on back down the family line. Parental neglect and abuse are frequent in the history of the aging dysfunctional family.

The now older parents can suffer from serious mental health problems such as schizophrenia or are bi-polar. Health and addiction problems like alcoholism are frequent.  Family interaction and communication, -parental treatment of siblings, brother and sister treatment of each other stepparent interaction and interface of everyone in the family has wrought deep tissue damage that never healed.

These aging dysfunctional families generally negotiated all of life’s developmental phases with great difficulty. The role in the family, especially the parental one, was murky with a poor, abusive or mentally unfit leader of the family. The rules in the family were unfair ambiguous or full of double binds. There is deep-seated ambivalence. Finally the last life transition in the aging family, the care of the declining parent, implodes the family, which had little balance to begin with. They are asked to care for parents who did not care for them, thus reeking havoc on an already disorganized aging family.

So good luck at the Memorial Day family gathering and perhaps consider hiring a geriatric care manager if you sibling war is affecting not only rituals like family gatherings but also the care of your aging parents. The GCM can help you end the constant hangovers and /or acid reflux.

 

Use an Agenda For an End of Life Sibling Family Meeting

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Setting an agenda for the siblings family meeting about end of life is critical and should be done before the meeting. It is your GPS to success.
Here is a case example. I once did geriatric care management for an aging woman who was dying. Her first husband had died a few years before and had immediately married her old high school boyfriend, who had dumped her, 50 years before..

She now had terminal cancer, had a gastric tube and had lapsed into a coma. She had given her new husband power of attorney for health care. He wanted to take her off life support but did not want her to come home nor did he want take care of her himself, with the support of Hospice. The old boyfriend wanted to have her cared for in a skilled nursing facility. A sibling family meeting took place at the hospital with all the step siblings, the new husband and the hospice social worker as mediator. Her blood children wanted her to go home, the place where they grew up, with 24-hour care, Hospice and life support removed. The new husband’s children, her stepchildren agreed with their Dad decision to take her off life support and move her to a nursing home to die, without 24 hour care. The hospice social worker, skilled in mediation, met with everyone, including her elder law attorney, pre the meeting and used those individual meetings to create an agenda.

An agenda allows all parties know ahead of time what you plan to discuss and is a vital part of the process. Research on care management of elders and midlife siblings a shows that any family meeting is not up to scratch when siblings go into it with an agenda

The elder family member, if present, adult siblings and power of attorney for health care, need to be clear on the meeting’s purpose or agenda

The facilitator or mediator must meet with the older adult and midlife siblings and power of attorney beforehand and individually discuss their point of view about the main problems to be solved, set goals for the meeting and use all information to create the agenda. For example if the meeting is whether to return home to die or go to a facility, then that subject should be discussed in each individual meeting and on the agenda.

The mediator or facilitator should also consul other professionals like physicians and hospice case managers or nurses, and elder law attorney’s, if involved, with a release of information, for results from medical tests, legal documents, or other the types of information that may be needed in the sibling family meeting to make decisions and discuss end of life. Any of this information that is pertinent to the goal of the meeting should be on the agenda. When the meeting begins, it is good for the mediator or facilitator to review the meeting goals and to clarify if specific decisions need to be made.

The end of the story is the dying elderly woman was moved to an excellent skilled nursing facility with 24-hour home care and Hospice. Life support was removed and she died three weeks later, her blood children at her side. The moral of the story is – do not marry that high school boyfriend who dumped you- and – use and agenda for a sibling family meeting about end of life. .

 

How to have a Step,Blood,Half sibling Family Meeting

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Did your blended family mix like oil and water over the mother’s day? Did the steps and the halves then skip father’s day? Do your blood children have a strained relationship with your stepchildren? Do your half siblings hate their whole siblings? Had the whole family blown up on the 4th of July? How about a step, half blood family meeting

If your bloods halves and steps

in an endless war why the sibling mess?

If you are Generation X and your parents were divorced- you might point your finger at your baby boomer parents – how they approached marriage and family relationships. These changes were a domino effect cascading down on Generation X and Generation Y, leaving them leery of commitment and endless angry with siblings

If you are Generation X or Y kid who grew up with divorce- did you yourself get divorced?

If  (bloods, steps and half’s) are heading down the road to writing their own sibling “I Hate You” story, make a summer resolution when the world seems to open.

If you are Gen X write a paragraph or two about the generational changes that occurred in your own family (like divorce or remarriage) that might have contributed to the strife between your own children -leading to sibling “I Hate You” stories.

If you are a baby boomer grandmother or grandfather watching your children grandchildren reel from divorce-, write a paragraph about how the generational values, both positive and negative, how they had an impact on your children and grandchildren and perhaps how you would like to change them.

A sibling family meeting can be organized by one of the siblings who seeks harmony instead of the sound of chalk on the blackboard. The steps you take can make steps, bloods and halves begin to reconcile so that Memorial Day, you might have everyone attend the event with a bit more harmony.

Consider unraveling your sibling tale with a sibling family meeting and make forgiveness part of the solution. .

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