Ep. 26 "Blended Doesn’t Equal Broken: Advice for Blended Families" - Guest Joel Hawbaker (Part 1 of 2)

Are you part of a blended family? Whether you’re a parent, grandparent, step-relative, or a teacher who interacts with these demographics, Joel Hawbacker has encouraging news for you! As a blended family dad and a teacher, he understands the nuanced and complex situations of blended family life. Joel shares data, stories, and practical tips with Melvin on The State of Education that will help you and your family navigate and thrive in everyday life! 

RESOURCES MENTIONED ON TODAY'S EPISODE: 

• Joel has spoken at the National Head Start Association multiple times. They have many valuable resources for blended families: ​​https://nhsa.org/  

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Transcript

Joel Hawbacker Interview Transcript

Interviewed by Melvin Adams

June 2022

Joel Hawbacker discusses the many complexities and nuances of home life for blended families—and how it impacts children and their educational journey. 

[00:00-28:53]

ADAMS: I am Melvin Adams, your host for the State of Education. Today we’re going to talk about something very common in our culture that impacts many school-aged children. 

We’re going to talk about blended families: [about] their dynamics and particularly their impact on children, their social-emotional health, and other things that may impact their learning development. 

I’m in the studio today with Joel Hawacker—a coach who has made this issue a significant part of his life and career. And so, Joel, it’s great to have you today. 

HAWBACKER: Yeah, thank you for having me on the show. I'm excited to chat with you  and hopefully be able to share some information that’ll be helpful. 

ADAMS: Awesome. Why don’t you just start out by sharing a little bit about yourself personally and a little bit about your background just to help our audience know where you’re coming from.

HAWBACKER: Sure. So I’m from Alabama originally and have lived most of my life here. When I was in middle school, my parents divorced. And so that was when I got my first real experience with a blended family. 

This was back in the second half of the 90s, but it was a bit less common. And I remember having the conscious thought of, “I just became a statistic.” and wasn’t really sure what to do with that. 

Fortunately, my parents had an excellent divorce. They got along better, they still lived in the same town, we still celebrated holidays together. About a year after they divorced my mom started dating again. And she started dating a guy that, even though they never married, I’d still call him my step-dad because they were together for a number of years.

And I saw my step-dad, Brian, and my dad, get along really well. Again, they made sure there was no competition, they made sure that they were all supportive of—I’ve got an older brother and younger sister—they were supportive of all three of us. 

And I didn’t realize how unusual that was until I got to college and I was having a conversation and told someone that I was going home for Thanksgiving and it was going to be my mom and my dad and my step-dad and my step dad’s dad—all around the same Thanksgiving table. 

And they sorta looked at me funny. I thought, “Oh, is that not what normal families do? Huh, okay.” And so fast forward, I got married halfway through college, I got married for the first time. We were married for 8 and a half years, we had two daughters together, and then we got divorced. 

That was back in 2010. And now I’ve been remarried for just over 8 years. I’ve spent a lot of that time as a school teacher. I went to college and graduated with a degree in history. And so most of my adult life has been spent teaching high school history and Bible. 

I’ve taught every grade from 5-12. I’ve taught a variety of other subjects at different places. I’ve taught math and science and English and history and P.E. and study skills and Bible. 

I’ve taught in a Chrsitian school, I’ve taught in a Muslim school, I’ve taught in public school. I’ve taught classes as big as 35 and classes as small as 2. And one of the things that I find is that kids are kids. 

Kids are kids regardless of what kind of school they’re coming from. Teenagers are teenagers. And so what’s interesting is to start looking at them, and what helped me was to understand the kind of backgrounds they were coming from. 

Because obviously if I’m teaching a class of 35 kids in a struggling school district in a public school, that’s not the same socio-economic background [of a] student I’m teaching in the private Christian school from a wealthier part of a city. 

Kids are kids, but their background also shapes a lot of who they are. And so that’s something that’s been really interesting to look at the differences. I had a lot less discipline issues teaching in the Muslim school than I did in the Christian school or public school. And that’s not really surprising culturally. Right?

What was interesting was the workload difference in each of those kinds of places. Obviously in the Muslim school, I didn’t have any kids comeing from blended families. In the Christian school and the public school, at this point it’s typically half or more of every classroom that I enter, [the] kids are coming from blended families. 

And so understanding those things really helps me understand the students better and it helps me relate to them better because I can relate to them a little bit about my own background. 

They go, “Okay, so the coach knows what we’re talking about here. Okay, good.” I had a student this past semester who was working on a big book project for me. And a couple of different times the book that she was reading for a project she accidentally left at her dad’s house when it was time to go to her mom’s house. 

And her parents don’t get along real well, and so I said, “It’s okay, get your book when you can, catch up when you can. Because I’m not going to punish you because your parents don’t get along.” And that’s one of the things we need to pay attention to. 

A lot of times it’s not the kid’s fault where they are, they didn't ask for the parents to split up. They certainly didn’t ask for the parents to not get along. And it’s important for them to know that they are being met with some compassion. 

ADAMS: I have your coaching mission here in front of me and let me read it for our audience. “I help people approach blended family life in a more positive way by focusing on taking a long-term perspective and placing children’s needs first.” Is that correct? 

HAWBACKER: Yes sir. 

ADAMS: Alright. Well let’s jump in here with a few questions. Let’s just start with laying it wide open with probably an obvious question that most people know the answer to. But maybe it would be good to just hit it anyway. So what is a blended family? 

HAWBACKER: There’s a wide variety of definitions you can use, actually. It’s one of those terms that different people use differently. For our purposes, a blended family is basically anything other than a traditional single-family household family. 

So that may be divorce and remarriage, it might simply be divorce. It might be co-parenting or parallel parenting where the parents were never actually married but they had a child together. It could involve adopted children or fostering. Because I’ve got all of those in my extended family as well. 

Like I’ve got an older brother who fosters. And then on my wife’s side of the family, her older brother has three biological children and two adopted children from overseas. 

And so these are different varieties of blended families. And the reason it's important to understand that is because when people think blended families, they often just think “step-family” and those can be the same. But I think blended family is a bit broader term and so it encompasses more than just a traditional step family. 

ADAMS: I think that’s a very good point. So why do you think discussions on blended families are relevant to many American households and to—particularly for our conversation today—all stakeholders in education? 

So we’re talking about parents and guardians. We’re talking about teachers, administrators, and the staff at school. Because all these folk have interaction with these children from blended families. 

HAWBACKER: It’s a great question because blended families are a lot more common now. Like I said, I can remember when my parents split up, at the time I think I knew one other whose parents were divorced. Like I had one classmate in the school whose parents weren’t together. So it was unusual. 

So today, it’s a lot more common. And as a result of that, like I said, at my classrooms at any given time, about half the kids I teach are coming from that kind of background.

And that matters for a whole variety of reasons. It matters because of scheduling issues, it matters because of emotional issues, it matters because of logistics—like I mentioned earlier with the student whose book got left at her dad’s house and she was at her mom’s house for a few days. It’s one of those things we need to at least pay attention to because it affects the child inside the classroom. 

So outside of my teaching, I actually do soccer coaching. I do a lot of work with the Head Start Association—the National Head Start Association. So I’ve spoken at their national conference a couple times. I’ve been to Oregon, I’ve been to Louisiana to speak at local Head Start groups, I’ve done (I don’t even know how many) online presentations for Head Start groups. 

Because a huge percentage of people that get involved in working with Headstart come from blended families. And the reason it’s so important for all the stakeholders is because blended families work differently. 

And if you haven’t ever been in one or you’re not close to anybody who’s in one, it just may not occur to you just how different it is because things that single household families take for granted—your traditional nuclear family, right? Mom, Dad, brother, sister, dog—the things that you guys take for granted, those just don’t happen. 

If they don’t happen in the same way. In blended families, again whether it’s something as big as where are you going to be over Thanksgiving break? Or whether it’s something as little as why is your textbook not with you? “Well I left it at dad’s house.” Right? 

Logistical issues, scheduling issues, you know. If you’re going to be assigning homework…even something just like daily homework. That can be affected by being in a blended family because where that child ends up, as we all know, homelife has a huge effect on what kids do in the classroom. 

Well, in blended families, most of the time the atmosphere, or the rules, or the culture of a house is different at mom’s and at dad’s. I’m not saying better, I'm not saying worse. Please don’t hear me criticizing moms or dads as a monolithic group, because they’re not. 

But in general, households are different with mom and dad so that means if you assign homework, the kid may come in one week and have all their homework done great. And then next week, the same kids doesn’t have their homework done at all. 

And it may have nothing to do with the child. It may have everything to do with the environment that they’re in at that particular moment, whether at mom’s or dad’s house. 

ADAMS: So that leads to another question. Every parent or guardian is a leader in their home. What should that leadership look like in a blended home? 

HAWBACKER: So, I use a framework that I’ve created called “The 10 CBF: the Ten Commandments for Blended Families.” And that’s a lot—and we’re not going to go through all ten because there wouldn’t be time. 

But in the Old Testament, God gave us Ten Commandments, and in the New Testament, Jesus kinda summarized those in two, right? The lawyer was trying to trip him up and he said, “What’s the greatest commandment?” God said, “Well, love the Lord your God, love your neighbor as yourself.” 

Well, in the same way, I’ve taken those ten commandments that I use and boiled them down into what I call “The Two Pillars” okay? They’re very simple, they’re very easy to remember.  But the first pillar is: be the adult you want your child to become, right? 

So that means if you’re the leader in your home, in your blended family, if you want your child to be respectful even if they are being disrespected, if you want them to be responsible even in the face of adversity, if you want them to have integrity—even if that’s not what they’re being met with on the other side—then you need to model that for your children. 

And that especially means how are you relating to your ex? Or how are you relating to the other adults involved in that child’s life? Whether it’s the ex, whether it’s grandparents… Believe it or not, grandparents can be a huge help to blended families, they can also be unnecessarily difficult sometimes. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

HAWBACKER: So grandparents have a big role to play as well. And I’m sure you guys see there is an increase in the percentage of kids in the classrooms now that are being raised by grandparents. And so that’s something that factors into blended families as well. 

So that’s the first of those pillars. Again, it’s not ground-breaking, it’s not earth shattering. It’s not even new! But be the adult you want your kids to become, right? I’ve never met a parent, in all my work, who says, “I want my child to be lazy, dishonest, and irresponsible.” 

I’ve never met a parent who says, “I want my child to be bitter, vindictive, and hurtful.” Okay, then we need to make sure we are not showing that to our children. And that’s where it gets difficult, right? 

Because as adults, we have big emotions like kids do and often we are more mature than they are—although sometimes we are not as mature as we should be, and so sometimes our emotions get the better of us. You can ask any of my soccer players—they can tell you. They’ve seen it happen! Right? On the sideline when my emotions get the better of me. 

We need to be cognizant of that, especially in our homes. We need to pay attention to the example we’re setting for our kids. Especially when we’re not quite as sure that they’re watching. The thing is, we need to be expecting them to be watching all the time. That’s the thing, we can’t let our guard down and just assume they’re not going to see something. 

ADAMS: So you mentioned this particularly in relationship to other adults, but I assume that you’re also implying that from adult to a child—

HAWBACKER: Absolutely. 

ADAMS: You model what it means to be the adult in the room. 

HAWBACKER: Absolutely. Yeah. And again, that’s easier said than done. And what it looks like changes as the children get older. That’s another tricky thing about blended families. Just as soon as you think you’ve got it sorted, your kid is a year older and all the dynamics change, right? 

ADAMS: That’s true… in a traditional family too. 

HAWBACKER: That’s exactly right, it’s complicated. You think you’ve got it sorted out and all of a sudden you get knocked back and you go, “Where’d that come from?” right? 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

HAWBACKER: And so it’s important to do that. And I’ll be the first to admit—and I’m sure my daughters would agree with me—I was not always great at being as respectful to my daughters as I expected them to be toward me. And that caused problems. And that’s my failure that I’ve had to deal with the fallout from. And again, it’s something that’s easy to say [but] it’s hard to do.

So that’s the first pillar. Be the adult you want your kids to become. The second one is to remember the golden rule and treat other people the way you want to be treated. They overlap a lot, but they’re also distinct. 

Because it’s not just modling it for your kids, as you said there in between those two, it’s also showing that to your children. And it’s especially important that you show that to them as they get older. Obviously the way you treat a 5-year-old respectfully is not the way you treat a 16-year-old respectfully. 

But there’s that balance that’s gotta be there because, in addition to wanting to be respectful to your kids and wanting to show them how to be respectful to you—you’re also still the parent. And unfortunately it seems that [in] my generation—I’ll be 40 later this year—a lot of parents have fallen into the temptation of wanting to be friends with their children while they are still children or teenagers, instead of wanting to be the parental authority that God calls us to be. 

Now I know that’s not fun. I know none of us probably like the idea of admitting that we are under authority, but that’s the reality we live in every moment of every day—we’re under somebody’s authority. And especially throughout all of history that we’ve seen, teeagers don’t like that. That doesn’t mean that we can abdicate that authority. 

ADAMS: I think that’s an important part of modeling adulthood. Because whether you believe that you’re under the authority of God (many of us do, some don’t) … but look, there’s always authority in everybody’s life, okay? 

It could be their boss, it could be the legal system, it could be society as a whole. There’s rules, there’s guidelines in all of our society and part of being an adult is understanding where those boundaries of authority are and being respectful in those. 

HAWBACKER: Correct. 

ADAMS: And that’s a huge part of modeling behavior to kids. And that’s one of the reasons why so many young people today are confused and there's such chaos in their lives. [It’s] because they’re not modeled … where are the boundaries? They’re not shown that for themselves and that’s not modeled by many adults around them unfortunately. 

HAWBACKER: Yeah, I agree. And I think one of the issues that goes along with that is that for kids—and you remember when your kids were little and when they get up to junior highschool one of the questions they have is “Why?” Why, why, why, why, why? 

So kids in my classroom, they want to know why we have certain rules. “Well why can’t I chew gum in class? Why can’t I bring my drink in the classroom? Why do I have to tuck my shirt tail in? Why do we have a dress code?” 

Those are legitimate questions. Now, when the kid is five years old, “Because I said so” is an entirely valid answer when the kid is 15, it may still be a valid answer, but by 15 we also ought to have a more complete answer besides just, “Because I said so.”  Right? 

When my girls were little, I didn’t need to explain to them the dangers of sticking their fingers into a socket and alternating current and its effects… “All you need to know is, you’re not allowed to do that because I said so.”

Now as they get older, we can explain to them, “Here’s why you’re not allowed to do that, because it will hurt you.” And so when I get kids in my high school classroom (because that’s what I’ve spent most of my time teaching—is high school kids)... when they come in and say, “Well why do we have to tuck our shirts in?” 

That’s a really good question. And it’s because most of the jobs you’ll have, there’ll be some kind of dress code. I don’t care if you’re a bag-boy at the local Winn Dixie, or if you’re working at McDonald’s for your first job flipping burgers, or if you’re a lifeguard at the local pool, or your’e working as a trash collector,you’re going to have a dress code at most of the jobs you work at. 

We are preparing you for life beyond highschool. Now, maybe you’re going to be an entrepreneur and you can show up to work wearing whatever you want every day. Okay great! Are you going to require the people who work for you to have any kind of dress code? And if so, are you going to model that for them? Or are you going to go, “I’m a CEO I can wear whatever I want.”? 

That’s up to you. But we have these rules for a reason. But generally speaking, the kids may still not like it, but they at least appreciate understanding why it’s there. They may still disagree with it, “Well that’s stupid.” “That’s ok. You’re allowed to think it’s stupid. At least you know why it’s there.” Right? 

And I think that’s an important part of modeling it too, as you mentioned. As they get older [we need to] explain why these things exist and why they're there in a helpful way. Because most rules also have a story behind them, unfortunately. 

But I’ve always found in my experience that it’s helpful to explain to kids and to teenagers, “Here’s why we have this rule, here’s what happened when we didn’t have that rule.” So if you happen to know that story, that’s helpful too. You know? 

ADAMS: Right. 

HAWBACKER: We use the example, a lot of the time, of guardrails on a highway, going up a mountain or whatever. The rules aren’t here to inhibit your freedom. The rules are here to maintain your safety so you can exercise your freedom in a way that is not harmful to you or to anybody else. 

ADAMS: Yeah. 

HAWBACKER: There’s no such thing as freedom in the sense of there are no rules. Kids think that freedom means, “I can do whatever I want.” Well that’s not true. That’s anarchy. If everybody could just do whatever they want, that’s not freedom. That’s anarchy! 

That’s not a society, that’s not a school, that’s not a house that I want to be part of. We have to have rules in order for stuff to function. As a soccer coach, I talk about that a lot. Because soccer is obviously played mostly with the feet. It’s  certainly not played with the hands most of the time. 

Well if you can just grab the ball and run, that’s no longer soccer. You have to have rules or you can’t have a game. You have to have laws or you can’t have a society. You have to have structure, or you don’t have any kind of organization. And I think again, most of the time when students understand that—even if they still don’t like the rules—they’re more likely to go along with them. Or, at least, they’re less likely to flagrantly be disrespectful of them. 

ADAMS: So you are both a parent and a teacher so I’m going to give you a two-part question here. How can a blended family best-navigate their child’s education? And how can schools better serve blended families? 

HAWBACKER: Those are really solid questions that I don’t think enough parents are asking and I don’t think enough schools are asking. So for the first part, the way for blended families to best navigate their kids’ education starts with conversations between the kid and the adults long before the kid ever gets into school. 

Because you have to ask yourself, “What kind of education do we want our child to have?” and “Where, based on where we live, can we most likely make that happen?” So we live in Alabama. And the town we live in, unfortunately, some of the public schools are just not very good. 

And so we’ve sent our kids to private school pretty much their entire lives. And that wasn’t easy to do because as a school teacher, I don’t make that much money! But we wanted to make sure that’s the kind of education they had. 

We wanted them to go to the local, small private Christian school. And so we worked together to make that happen in terms of who’s paying tuition and that sort of thing. But it starts with conversations before the kid is in school if possible. 

If the child or children are already in school, then you need to sit down and ask yourselves, “Okay, what is our priority? What is our goal? Is our goal for our child to go to high school so that they can get into a good college?” Because if that’s the case, you need to have them at an academically oriented highschool. 

Is it hoping they’re going to get some kind of athletic scholarship, which is an entirely different conversation. But if that’s the case then maybe you look at the athletic program. Is it, “We want our kid to have some kind of character development in their education?” Well is there a local classical school or are you considering homeschooling. Is it a parochial school, like a Christian school, rather than just a private school? 

These are questions that are really hard to answer in blended families because what if mom says one thing and dad says something else? And that’s where it gets really complicated. And so again, what I try to teach people is, look for the areas that you have in common. 

Again, parents aren’t going to say, “I want my kid to get away with doing as little as possible.” We want them to have at least some kind of rigor in their academic work. Okay, well then let’s make sure that’s actually happening where they are. And if it isn’t, then maybe we look at other options. 

But that gets complicated because any time you switch schools or institutions, it can mess with schedules, it can mess with extra-curriculars. And again, every one of those issues is more complex in a blended family. But it starts with a conversation between the adults.

Now, if the child is—there’s not a hard and fast age, I would say anywhere from 10-12, up—then maybe you also involve the child in the question of: here’s what we’re thinking for your education, here’s where we want you to go because of that. What are your thoughts on that? 

It doesn’t mean you let the child make the decision. There’s a big difference between asking for their feedback and letting them make the decision. I’m not a big fan of giving 12 and 13 year-olds power over their long-term decision making. I don’t think that’s wise. 

But at that age, go ahead and ask. Yeah, I think it’s a good idea to involve them if you can, but again—I wouldn’t give them the keys to the car when they’re not even old enough to drive. So that’s the first part. 

You also asked about what schools can be doing differently. I think one of them is—and I know this sounds bad because schools are already inundated with this kind of stuff—maybe just have a little, brief training before your school in-service to let teachers, who aren’t from this kind of background, know what it’s like for a kid from a blended family. 

Give them some information about—you don’t have to use kids from your school, but just in general—okay, so this kid may spend one week with mom and one week with dad. This kid spends 12 days with mom and every-other-weekend with dad. And this kid actually lives with mom here, dad lives out-of-state, so he only sees the child over Christmas break and for a month over the summer or whatever it may be. 

So then you sit around and you ask some of the questions you go, “Okay, so how does that affect little John or Susie or Damien or whoever? How does that affect them in the classroom?” and you just brainstorm on some of those things. 

This is what I do with a lot of the Head Start groups that I work with. And I’ll ask them for specific examples of, “How has a blended family impacted the student that comes to your center?” Right? I’ve heard some amazingly bad stories about… 

There was one mom who volunteered at a Head Start center specifically because she had a restraining order against her ex-husband. So now her ex-husband couldn’t come pick up their child because he wasn’t allowed to come within three hundred feet. 

And so they had to walk to the end of the block so dad could pick the child up. Otherwise, dad was going to get in trouble for not picking up his child on time. And the mom did that just to be manipulative and it was like, “Oh my goodness.”

But that’s the kind of stuff that can come up in blended families. Unfortunately that’s the sort of thing that can happen. And so I think the biggest thing for schools is just increasing awareness of what it can mean for students to be in blended families. 

Because the other part that’s hard for teachers—again, I’ve seen this from the teaching side—is when you have a student in a blended family, who do you contact? If I have an issue with a student in my class, do I call mom or do I call dad? Or do I call both? Or do I email them? And if I email one, do I copy the other person on the same email? Or do I send a separate email so that they don't know that the other one got it? Or am I supposed to let them… ?

And honestly sometimes you may need to ask your school’s administrative office, “Is there legal paperwork that documents what I’m supposed to do?” because a lot of Head Start centers have to have a copy of divorce agreements or whatever it is. Because there are sometimes when it’s not safe to contact dad—you’re only supposed to contact mom. Right? 

And so you have to be careful, you have to watch out for the legal side of that. And then again, in traditional nuclear family households, you just call home. You call whoever’s number is on there and that’s ok. 

But then again, having seen it as a parent and a teacher, it can get complicated. If there’s an issue at school, who is the school supposed to…? Or, who has permission to pick up the children? Right, so I’m divorced and re-married. Do my wife’s parents—the children’s step-grandparents—do they have permission to pick my kids up from school? 

And whose permission do they need? Do they need the school’s permission? Do they need my permission? Do they need my ex-wife, their mom’s, permission? Do they need legal permission? These are issues that schools need to be aware of. Because, again, unfortunately if my in-laws are not allowed to pick up my kids and the school lets them get in their car, [27:30] now the school is liable and maybe they just didn’t know! And these are just complicated things that just come up. 

ADAMS: So Joel, you’re absolutely right-on in what you’re talking about in the complexity in situations with blended families. Particularly some of the things you've talked about, you talked about them from the standpoint of the school in general. 

But really, of course we are talking about administrators and all the paperwork [28:00] and some of that stuff. But really a lot of this comes down to the individual teachers and what they have to go through. A lot of people don’t really think about the complexity of what happens in a teacher’s daily life in addition to trying to teach all these kids. 

You know, trying to keep all these relationships sorted out and keep the child [28:30] first in everything and making sure that child is getting the support and all the right communications at the right time and all these things. It’s very complicated and so kudos to all our teachers out there that are working so hard to get this right. It’s absolutely important that they do.