Dating and being a parent inherently don't belong together. In a natural course of events, the two have no reason to intersect and they are time-lapsed phases in a person's life. Yet when the natural order is upset, the impossible must need to happen. You have to try extra hard to make it work both for your significant other and the children.
Until the adults have formally decided to spend their lives together, young kids have no need to be any part of the picture. Whatever their initial reservations about the step-parent, chances are they will come around to accepting them if they see this new person love their parent and make them happy. To go about dating like one would in their single days when an impressionable child is involved is somewhat selfish and irresponsible.
Being a single parent myself, I know only too well the pitfalls of a cautious and guarded approach to relationship and dating. It works as a huge turn off for a lot of people. Men are looking to date women and not mothers. If your child looms menacingly large on the horizon, chances are that the relationship will not even take off let alone reach anywhere. You must brace yourself for many disappointments and false starts.
It is much the same for a woman dating an over-zealous single dad who will do whatever it takes to protect his child from getting emotionally involved from whoever he is dating. She gets the sense that the child is the immovable center of his universe and she can at best hope to be a satellite orbiting around the periphery of their lives. While her impression may be completely wrong, it would be hard for him to disabuse her of it without making compromises on his parenting beliefs.
The element of fun and spontaneity are the primary casualties in such situation. It is so much easier for the other person if they don't have kids to date someone who is single just like them. Unless they are truly invested in you and the children in your lives, they would not run the obstacle course necessary to form a lasting bond. To settle for anything less would be short-changing oneself and one's child and yet a lot of single parents do that time after time.
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