My husband and step daughter

 My mother and step dad

 My mother (silver) and mother-in-law (blue)

My new family

A relationship can feel effortless and exciting, successful long-term relationships involve ongoing effort and compromise by both partners. Building healthy patterns early in your relationship can establish a solid foundation for the long run. Changes in life outside your relationship will impact what you want and need from the relationship. Since change is inevitable, welcoming it as an opportunity to enhance the relationship is more fruitful than trying to keep it from happening.  I don’t have close friends that live right near me, but I still talk to my two good friends from college.  We are all very calm people. We don’t argue. Crystal lives in Missouri. Shinika lives in Tennessee.                                             

All of the relationships I mentioned are important to me because I have people to talk to about things that trouble me, and I have people who appreciate who I am and appreciate that I listen to them.  One challenge to relationships is when one person does not seem to need the other person as much as that person needs them. Another challenge is being far away from friends. My mom and my friends are non-judgmental and calm. This has helped us maintain our relationships.

It is important as a professional to be nonjudgmental if I want parents and children to feel comfortable with me. Proximity also breeds closeness, so if the parents do spend time in the classroom and the children do attend school regularly it will help build relationships. Other regular forms of communication would also help build relationships. It would be important for me to focus on accepting people with different beliefs. It would also be important for me to think about what could be making my relationships with parents or children less than warm if I should feel this lack of warmth from the children or the parents or within myself.