Dr. Richard Hogan

It's definitely on the rise.

It's on the rise.

It's still not a huge thing, but it's definitely increased over the last number of years, and I would see that borne out clinically and all the rest of it.

I suppose what we're going to look at today is the kind of the do's and don'ts and the kind of, you know, the little pitfalls that happen with blended families and how to get it right and how to get it wrong.

Yeah.

And from my experience here, I suppose there can be a kind of a rush to make the perfect family.

You know, that they move in very quickly and they have expectations that everything is going to go great and it's going to go well.

Do they?

Yeah, I think that in my experience out working, this is where it kind of can fall apart a little bit.

And so people come out of really broken, people come out of, children I'm talking about here, can come out of really difficult situations when the relationship ends, when a marriage ends or when a relationship ends.

There can be a lot of conflict there.

It's ended for a reason.

There's conflict, there's problematic relationships, dynamics in there, right?

And so as an intervention to that, children can often be quite reluctant to welcome a new partner into their lives.

And in my experience, what would be borne out would be actually children, boys find their mother's relationship or their mother's sexuality, you know, the idea.

Big challenge.

A big challenge.

Right.

But just on that point, what I was going to say there was that so kids come out of like difficult relationships and there's an intervention that they might become a little bit.

You know, you might love the partner.