Editor’s note: Ken Potts is taking some time off. In his absence, we are republishing a series of columns that first ran in 2003. This column is the second of 10 exploring the topic of healthy families.

Families just don’t blend.

We’ve heard about “blended families” — families with a husband and wife and their kids from previous marriages. We also call them “stepfamilies,” “reconstituted families,” “remarriages,” and even “Brady Bunch families.” But no matter what we call them, we need to stop expecting them to blend.

Blending suggests that two families can come together and become one family. Maybe we assume we will somehow put aside all the differences and quirks that make our families unique and meld into yet another new, totally different family.

Or maybe we expect that one family will win out over the other and impose its own style on the new family.

Whatever our expectations, families don’t work that way. A family’s uniqueness is the result of generation upon generation of family development. Our great-grandparents, grandparents and parents all contributed to the family we are now. And this family heritage is then molded and shaped even more by our family’s life experiences.

Just getting married without kids requires a major effort at sorting out family differences. Almost all of us can recall minor or major marital skirmishes based on nothing more than the different ways our families did things.

Fortunately, most adults can work through these differences and create a new family that is a composite of both partners’ family heritage and both partners’ beliefs about what family should be all about.

When two parents remarry, however, the children involved simply are not able to pull this off. In fact, their sense of family uniqueness (“this is the way our family does things”) may be one of the more important things they have held on to in order to get themselves through their parents’ divorce.

To suddenly add a stepparent, stepbrothers and stepsisters who have their own way of being family and to expect everybody to blend into a new family is more than children of any age can handle.

Rather than blending, I suggest we think more of “mixing” in such situations. Each family can hold on to its own way of doing things without trying to impose its rules, habits or traditions on its new partner family.

For example, if one family always opens gifts on Christmas Eve while the other waits until Christmas morning, then let family members continue with both traditions by opening gifts at both times. Or if the tradition for one family is to have supper together while the other family seldom does, just let things be.

Of course, some compromises will inevitably need to be negotiated, especially around housekeeping or roommate issues (dirty dishes, muddy shoes, control of the TV remote, etc.)

But an awful lot of what we might see as important issues in creating a new family can be avoided if we just give each old family some room to be themselves.

Actually, when we parents take the pressure off our remarried families to blend, we usually do a good job of mixing. And we even develop a sense of ourselves as a unique new family. Rather than giving up who we were, we seem to add to our family heritage yet another layer of rules, habits and traditions special to our new family arrangement.

So if we’re getting remarried and we’ve got kids, let’s remember: mix, don’t blend.

• Dr. Ken Potts is on the staff of Samaritan Counseling Center in Naperville and Downers Grove. He is the author of “Mix Don’t Blend, A Guide to Dating, Engagement and Remarriage With Children.”