Is Bonus Families Right For Your Blended Family?

Divorced Parents, Remarried Couples Can Keep Good Relations for Kids

Mar 9, 2009

Remarried couples who want to keep good relations with their ex-husbands or ex-wives for the sake of children or stepchildren may want to explore Bonus Families®.

Remarried couples with blended families may be seeking a source of reliable information to help them face the unique situations that crop up among divorced parents and their children. Bonus Families® offers extensive resources for combining families, parenting step-children and dealing with ex-husbands and ex-wives.

What is Bonus Families?

Bonus Families is a non-profit organization that seeks to support divorced parents, step-parents and step-children by providing advice and resources to help keep peaceful relations among combined families. Bonus Families encourages working together for the sake of the children in the blended family and requires a commitment to making a difficult situation more peaceful for everyone.

Bonus Families was created by Jann Blackstone-Ford, a divorce and step-family mediator, and Sharyl Jupe. Jupe is married to Blackstone-Ford’s ex-husband. After years of navigating the difficult waters of divorced parents, a blended family and step-children, Blackstone-Ford and Jupe decided to create Bonus Families to help others in the same situation. The organization’s goal is to offer mediation, conflict management, support and education to people attempting to combine families after a divorce or separation.

Bonusfamily Instead of Blended Families

A bonusfamily is more than just a fancy name for step-family, according to Jupe and Blackstone-Ford. The term is symbolic of a partnership among the biological parents and step-parents to work together for the sake of the children involved. The adults in a bonusfamily strive for good communication to help raise healthy children.

It is also an attempt to remove the negative connotations that are associated with terms like step-family, step-mother, step-father or step-children. “Using the word bonus instead of step is an acknowledgement of the hard work it takes to make a stepfamily successful,” according to the Bonus Families website. “The term bonus also supplies a positive label to a family that lives together and the parent figures who are not married to each other.”

Why Call a Step-Mother a Bonusmom?

The term bonusmom was born from an attempt to make it easier on Blackstone-Ford’s step-daughter Melanie to know what to call her. Every time Melanie introduced Blackstone-Ford as her step-mother, people assumed they did not like each other.

What they needed was a term of endearment that did not threaten Melanie’s biological mother, Jupe, and did not have a negative connotation. Creating the name bonusmom was the perfect compromise for everyone. It also creates a perfect name for step-children. “Each time I call my stepkids my bonus kids, it lets them know I feel their presence is an asset to my life,” Blackstone-Ford said.

Resources for Blended Families

The Bonus Families website offers many resources for blended families who want to become bonusfamilies, as well as those who are seeking ways to deal with problems with ex-husbands, ex-wives and step-children. The site includes four sections: Bonus Families, Ex-Etiquette, Bonus Community and Bonus Resources.

Each section is further broken down into categories to find more specific information, such as divorce, single parents, co-parenting, bonus teens and kids, and more. The Bonus Community includes message boards, support groups, news and events and other information. Remarried couples can sign on the mailing list to receive e-mails about upcoming event and website updates.

Remarried Couples Can Join Bonus Families

For blended families who want even more support, Bonus Families offers a membership to exclusive content and expert advice. The $29.95 membership fee includes a monthly newsletter and a gift certificate for the Bonus Families® online store. Members also receive guaranteed communication with a panel of experts.

Remarried couples who want to provide a loving and supportive environment for the children in the blended family may want to explore the resources offered by Bonus Families. Seeking to change the negative connotations associated with step-families, Bonus Families provides information on ex-etiquette, dealing with step-children and improving communication for the sake of the children. Many resources are available free of charge, but membership is available for a small fee.