Some of the most moving ceremonies I have led have had a child standing slightly to one side, watching carefully, not entirely sure yet how they feel about the day. I always notice them, because a wedding that brings two families together is doing something rather more delicate than joining two people, and the children in the room usually understand that before anyone says it out loud.

If you are marrying with children already in the picture, whether they are yours, your partner’s, or both, you are almost certainly further along in your thinking than a first-time couple. You know what you want to avoid. What you may not know yet is how much of that can be shaped in the ceremony itself, which is where a personalised ceremony earns its name, because there is genuinely no template that could hold your particular family.

You are also in better company than the wedding industry tends to suggest. The Office for National Statistics found that in 2022, around one in five people marrying in England and Wales had been married before, so a great many ceremonies each year are doing this same work.

Should You Make Vows to Your Partner’s Children

This is the question couples ask me most often, and it does not have a single right answer.

Vows to children can be beautiful, and when they land well, they give a child something solid to hold on to at a moment when their family is rearranging itself around them. They also carry a risk because a public promise puts a child in front of an audience at an age when they may not want to be there, and I have read enough accounts from grown adults who were once that child to know that some found it excruciating rather than reassuring.

I usually suggest separating the sentiment from the staging. If there is something you want to say to your partner’s children, you can absolutely say it, and you can do it in a letter given to them privately before or after the ceremony rather than aloud in front of forty guests. The words matter just as much, and often more, when they are not performed.

If You Do Want to Say It Aloud

Keep it short. A child who is uncertain, or who is still quietly hoping their parents might reconcile, will feel every extra sentence. Two or three lines addressed warmly and then moving on tends to work far better than an extended passage, and it leaves the child feeling included rather than exposed.

When a Child Would Rather Not Take Part

Please do not push, and please do not read reluctance as rejection of you. Children in blended families sometimes feel that taking an active role would be disloyal to their other parent, and that is a real and reasonable feeling rather than a problem to be solved on the day.

There is a version of this that goes wrong in a way I would gently warn against, which is including a very young child so prominently that they become decorative, standing in for a closeness that has not had time to build yet. Their relationship with you will be made over years of ordinary evenings rather than in twenty minutes in front of guests, and the ceremony does not need to do that work.

The Wording Nobody Warns You About

Here is something that rarely comes up in planning conversations until I raise it. A great deal of standard ceremony language leans on the idea of forever, of one love, of a first and only, and in a room where at least one previous marriage ended, that language can sit strangely, particularly for children who lived through it.

Because a personalised ceremony is written from a blank page, we can simply choose differently. We can talk about choosing each other now, about what you have both learned, about building something with clear eyes rather than starting again from innocence. Couples are often relieved when they realise this is available to them, because they had assumed the awkwardness was unavoidable rather than a wording problem.

Ways to Include Children Without Putting Them on the Spot

Some of the loveliest options ask nothing of a child except presence. A sand ceremony works well here, particularly since it can take more than two colours, so every member of the family pours into the same vessel and the result goes home with you. I have written more about this and other options in my post on symbolic ceremonies.

Practical roles often suit older children and teenagers better than anything symbolic, because carrying the rings, choosing a piece of music, or reading something they picked themselves gives them a job rather than a spotlight. Younger ones are frequently happiest simply walking in alongside you.

When Only One of You Has Children

This comes up more than people expect, and it changes the balance of the ceremony. If your partner is becoming a step-parent for the first time while you are the parent, the ceremony can acknowledge that they are joining something already established rather than pretending both sides arrive equally.

Adult stepchildren are their own particular case, especially where the age gap is small or the relationship is new. Formal vows towards an adult you have met a handful of times will feel strained to everyone including them, and a warm mention within your vows to your partner, promising to care for the people they love, usually carries far more weight.

Where to Start

If you are somewhere near the beginning of this, the most useful first step is a conversation with your children rather than with a supplier, because everything we build afterwards depends on what they actually want. Once you know that, we can shape the ceremony around it, and if the answer changes between now and the day, which it sometimes does, we can change with it.

I have created more than six hundred ceremonies across the UK and Europe, in English, in German, and often in both, and the ones involving children are consistently among the ones I think about afterwards. There is something particular about watching a family decide, out loud and in front of the people they love, to become itself.

If this is where you find yourselves, I would love to hear about your family and what you are hoping the day might feel like. There is nothing to commit to, just a conversation, and I am very happy to talk through what might work before you decide anything at all.

Source: Office for National Statistics, Marriages in England and Wales: 2021 and 2022.