Guest: Christina McGhee, MSW, author of Parenting Apart, founder and lead trainer of the Co-Parenting Specialist Certification Training program, and Education and Training Director for the Split Outreach Project
Theme: How families grow after divorce, and how to introduce a new partner without putting your children through another loss
Episode summary
Christina McGhee became a bonus parent before she had children of her own. She was a social worker, a child of divorce, and by her own description someone who had a clear list of everything she did not want to repeat and almost no idea what she should actually do instead. Her bonus children were three and five when she married their father. She describes standing at the edge of that pool and being told the water was cold, then jumping in and discovering just how cold it really was. She looked like a mom, she did mom-like things, yet she was not their mom. Thirty-two years later, she has built a career out of the gap she fell into: plenty of information about what the problem was, very little about what to do next.
This conversation goes upstream from the wedding day and the moving truck, to the moment a divorced parent first thinks about dating again. Karen and Christina work through what happens when we move faster than our kids can, why resilience is instilled rather than inherited, and why children of divorce rarely experience the emotional impact of divorce only once. They also make the case for the unglamorous work that most couples skip entirely: the conversation about what kind of parenting team you actually want to be. The through line is one Karen returns to often, “How we begin is often how we end”. The choices made in the first six months of a new relationship shape the family that exists ten years later.
We cover
- Why “just because you’re ready, doesn’t mean your kids are ready” should be the governing rule of dating after divorce
- The absence of a magic number, and what to look for instead of a timeline
- Secondary loss, and what happens when kids attach to a new adult partner, who then disappears
- Why resilience is not innate, and what parents actually have to do to build it
- The statistical reality that second and third marriages carry higher risk, and what that cascade means for kids
- Giving your co-parent a heads up before your kids meet someone new, and why parents push back on this
- The necessity for a conversation before the connection, with both your co-parent and your children
- What a good first meeting looks like, and why a sit-down dinner is the wrong choice
- The drip, drip, drip approach to introductions, and why this is not the Brady Bunch
- Guidance for the bonus parent stepping in: additional parenting figure, not replacement parent
- Generous interpretation and assuming positive intent when territorial dynamics show up
- Sheriffs and deputies: how discipline and parenting authority get divided in the early stages
- The conversations couples often skip about values, money, holidays, and household expectations
- Building predictability and consistency inside one home rather than trying to control the other home
- Honoring that your bonus children’s life story did not begin with their parents’ divorce
- Why the small moments have more staying power than the big productions
Highlights & takeaways
- “Resilience doesn’t show up out of thin air. It’s not innate, it’s instilled.” Christina reframes the most common parental shortcut. Kids are not automatically fine. They become resilient through thoughtful guidance, which means the choices adults make are the mechanism, not an obstacle to it.
- “Your dating life should not be at your child’s convenience. It should be your inconvenience.” Karen names the scheduling argument directly. Christina’s answer, “There are a lot of things about parenting that are inconvenient. We don’t have children because they’re convenient.”
- “Kids of divorce rarely experience divorce just once.” When each new partnership is introduced early and then ends, children re-experience the grief of the first divorce. Do it enough times and they stop attaching, because nobody is going to stick around.
- “Biological parents are the sheriffs and bonus parents are the deputies.” A clean framework for the early stages of blended family life. Bonus parents play a supportive role. Biological parents stay on the front line.
- “A lot of times we spend more time planning our vacation than we do planning what kind of family we want to have.” Christina on the conversations couples skip. Love is not a parenting plan. Values, discipline, holidays, money, and belonging all need to be discussed before they are tested.
- “Their life story did not start with their parents’ divorce.” A caution against the clean-slate instinct in bonus families. Honoring a child’s history is not a threat to your relationship with them. It is the foundation of it.
- Curiosity before criticism. Karen and Christina land on generous interpretation as a daily practice. The thought bubble that says “Why didn’t they?” gets replaced with “Huh, I wonder…?” It is a softer start, and it gets you closer to real information and connection.
- The bonus is the point. Christina’s closing reflection: there is no cap on how many healthy, loving adults a child can have in their life. There is no quota of love to divide. Kids have the chance at a genuinely expansive view of family, and it is the notes in the lunchbox and the canopy over the bunk bed that they still remember at thirty-five.
Content note
This episode discusses children’s grief and repeated loss, the emotional impact of divorce on kids across their lifespan, territorial conflict between households and between bonus and biological parents, parental regret, and the higher rate of divorce in second and third marriages. It also touches on situations where a biological parent restricts a bonus parent’s role in the household. The conversation is educational and is not a substitute for therapy, legal advice, or clinical support.
Resources mentioned
- Parenting Apart: How Separated and Divorced Parents Can Raise Happy and Secure Kids by Christina McGhee. Written to be a resource, rather than read cover to cover. Christina’s advice: start with the table of contents, pick one chapter, and read for ten or fifteen minutes.
- divorceandchildren.com Christina’s website, with articles and a free 25-page resource guide for parents that includes books for kids, books for parents, and podcast recommendations organized by topic. Her words: a better starting place than Google at two in the morning.
- Split Outreach Project, splitfilm.org A nonprofit documentary project by filmmaker Ellen Bruno. Split: The Early Years follows twelve children between the ages of six and twelve talking about life across two households. Split Up: The Teen Years returns to eleven of those same children ten years later, showing how divorce continued to shape their lives into adolescence and young adulthood.
- Co-Parenting Specialist Certification Training Christina is the founder and lead trainer. Karen is a graduate of the program.
- Previous episode with Christina McGhee (2023) on navigating the holidays across two households. Worth revisiting if that season is coming up for you.
Connect
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Additional support
If you are considering dating again and want help thinking through timing, conversations with your co-parent, or how to prepare your kids, this is exactly the kind of work Karen does with clients. Learn more at karenmcnenny.com.
If your children are struggling with the transition between households, a child or family therapist who understands divorce can help. Christina’s resource guide at divorceandchildren.com includes age-appropriate books and tools you can start with today.
Karen’s book, The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family, offers a full roadmap for restructuring a family without destroying it.
Everything will be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.
