Welcome to the Awesome Marriage Podcast, a place for honest conversations about marriage and how to have the relationship that God has designed for you.

I am your co-host, Christina Dodson.

On the show will be our host, Dr. Kim Kimberling and Nill Smith.

To engage with the Awesome Marriage podcast, use the hashtag Awesome Marriage.

This week on the podcast, we're doing a mini series on three tips to thriving as a step

parent.

And today is tip number three, realize it takes time.

So patients as a new stepparent can be so difficult.

So many step parents work so hard to build relationships and to build trust with

their stepchildren and they just don't see quick results. So why does it take so much time to

establish a blended family while Dr. Kim? Because you've got a lot of ingredients to go into it.

You know, if you do it, if you do like take a whiteboard and you put like just a mom and a dad

and a child,

biological family. Well, then, you know, it changes when that third person comes into it.

So now you've got a step family. And so you've got a step parent and a parent.

Then you've got the exes probably out there. Maybe someone had passed away. That complicates it too. And then you've got kids. So you've got all these dynamics and all these relationships going.

And it is going to take time.

If you had just you one-on-one with somebody, you can probably make that happen a lot quicker

in a quicker period of time.

You don't have the distractions.

You can focus on that person.

But now you're trying to build a relationship with a new spouse. And we've talked about in one of these, how important it is to keep God first spouse second. So you're working on that. And then you've

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