When Is It Time To Meet Your BF's Kids - Relationship Advice

When do you think is an appropriate amount of time to meet someone's kids. My boyfriend of 4...

months hasn't introduced me to his 14 and 16 year old. However I have met his family. Other than getting text messages while he is at work, I do not hear from him when he has his kids 4 days out of the week.

-goodpeep

Thank you for requesting this Hub from me.

I think this is a great question with many variables, so let's go through some of them.

With very young children I think probably a year or close to it might be an appropriate amount of time to be dating someone before bringing them into your children's lives. The Catch 22 of this is you don't want to get serious about someone that doesn't hit it off with your kids. At the same time, you don't want to confuse the children by bringing a new mate of yours into their lives too quickly where they could form bonds and grow attached, only to be disappointed again when the relationship doesn't last. 

Another big factor is the amount of time that has elapsed since the divorce. The couple of years that immediate follow the family's separation are especially difficult ones. The kids need time to adjust to the new arrangements, to seeing mom and dad as separate individuals and not as a couple. They need to see how each maintains their love and commitment to the kids, even though their relationship with each other has ended for the most part. During that time, meeting a new romantic partner for either parent would be disturbing.

Your boyfriend's children are not little. At ages 14 and 16 they are old enough to handle the idea that dad is dating. They should be able to form or not form attachments based on their like of a person. They aren't too young too meet you "too quickly."

I don't know how long your boyfriend has been separated from the mother of his children, but if the divorce was recent, that could be a factor as why he's slow to make this introduction. 

Normally I would warn you that his putting this off could be an indicator that you aren't the only new woman in his life. Maybe the kids have already met a woman he's dating. Or maybe he's telling them the divorce is their mother's ideas and he just wants her back. There could be a reason you're not meeting the kids which is based in some kind of deception toward your.

But the fact that you have met his family as you've said eliminates the basis for that warning.

I suspect that sometimes even when the kids are old enough and enough time has passed, there's a fear that introducing the kids to the new girlfriend automatically elevates the new relationship to a serious status. His delaying the meeting may be his way of delaying the seriousness of his commitment his girlfriend. 

The idea that he does not contact you at all when in the presence of his children is odd to me. Surely at 14 and 16 they do not spend every moment together when they are in his charge. They are at an age where they are texting friends, interesting in dates, watching youtube videos, etc. They can't possibly be spending all their time with him for the full 4 days out of the week that he's with them.

Even if the days were that full and busy, presumably he does go to bed eventually. There's no reason why he can't call you to say good night.

This piece of information makes me suspicious that there's something going on here. Honestly peep, I don't think this has to do with whether or not you've been dating him long enough to meet his two teenagers. I think this has to do with something else.

I think you need to ask yourself what else is going on here. Even though you've met his family, is he seeing someone else? Is he trying to get back together with his ex-wife? Is he just using this as a way to put the brakes on his relationship with you?

Or maybe things are fine, but you need to relax. Maybe you are the only woman in his life but he's not ready for things to be as serious as you may want them to be. Maybe he feels if he tries to tell you that, that you don't listen. So he's had to come up with another way to keep things at a pace he can handle. 

Dating for 4 months is a very short amount of time. Is he misperceiving some kind of pressure from you to step up a commitment? 

Obviously  only you two have all the answers here. My advice is to have an honest conversation with him about this. If one of you isn't being honest with the other, you don't have a relationship to work on, so it's time to move on. But if you can both communicate honestly about what you're both really doing, then maybe you can listen to each other's point of view and try to compromise so that you can both feel comfortable. 

Good luck.