CHILDREN who come from broken families suffer in a variety of ways. Many of them grow with either a psychological pain, a complex or at a disadvantage, which is caused by them not having both parents play a balanced role in their development.
So imagine the negative effect that a new step-parent can have on an already ‘troubled’ child. The child may feel sidelined and unloved. Issues of trust and jealously may prevent a child from ever accepting his or her new step-parent into the fold: even more so if the step-parent shows little interest in the child. Step-parents are usually provided to fulfil the needs of the mother/father, but very seldom are the needs of the child or children in the family taken into consideration. Today on 4 minutes 4 change we share Olivia’s story.

OLIVIA’S STORY
When you are a child big people make decisions and you have to go along with them, they do not ask for your opinion. My stepmother never liked my younger brother or me from the beginning. She met us when we were five and four years old, so she had plenty of time to get used to the fact that our father had children.

We were living with our biological grandmother on our mother’s side at the time because our mother had left us with a neighbour and gone into the interior, so we had more or less been abandoned. Our father would visit granny once a week and bring food items for us, so granny was glad to give us to him when he asked, she thought he’d take good care of us. But even before we got to know our father properly, we found ourselves living with him and his fiancée. We were eight and nine years old when we moved in with them.
It soon became apparent that there had been no discussion between them beforehand about how we would live as a family and nothing fell into place. Our step-mother’s resentment towards us was plain to see, she had nothing good to say about my brother or me and would pass remarks about our ‘good-for-nothing’ mother and our grandmother, whom she claimed ‘threw us out in the street.’

My father must have known that the arrangement wasn’t working, but he did nothing. He didn’t pull her up for talking to us in a cold, ‘piggish’ manner, neither did he say anything when she made us do chores literally all day with no time for play.
I began to wonder why our Father took us from our granny in the first place; he certainly wasn’t showering us with his love or giving us much attention and he made no attempt to protect us or represent us when our step-mother made our lives hell. The experience of growing up with them made me feel empty inside, all the natural love and affection that I needed to share with caring adults became stifled by their nonchalant attitude towards me and by brother. I didn’t show affection because I wasn’t receiving any. I wasn’t proud of anything I achieved because there was no one to share my achievements with; in short, it was just a very unfulfilling childhood.

After having such a negative impact on our lives, my step-mother and our father eventually split up and at the age of 18, I was sure of two things in life: one, that horrible people really do exist in the world and two, that I was going to pursue a career where I’d be able to help children. Since then I haven’t met anyone quite in her league, thank goodness and I am currently working towards my ‘Masters’ in Child Psychology. I used my negative upbringing to propel me in the right direction. Now I can help children who may be suffering from childhood trauma. I can show them the care and attention that were so lacking in my own childhood.