by Ron L. Deal “How tall is it?” I ignorantly asked a Kenyan missionary. “Mount Kilimanjaro is over 19,000 feet tall,”...

by Ron Deal – Stepfathering can be challenging — and perhaps that’s why many stepfathers disconnect from their stepchildren. But stepfathers can have profound and important leadership roles.

Whether you realize it or not, your stepfamily has likely assumed a specific integration style. By that, I mean a set of assumptions about how your stepfamily 'ought' to come together. I like to use cooking as an analogy to identify some integration styles that stepfamilies attempt to utilize. Let’s start with the ones that generally don't work.