She may (or may not) be comfortable being around your child(ren) when you start dating. If she IS concerned about how your children will feel and react about her presence, that’s a good sign she’s a keeper. If she doesn’t care how your children feel about her being around, she’s NOT a keeper.

In a nutshell, YOU care about her comfort first, AS LONG AS indeed she cares about your children’s comfort above her own. That’s a good symbiotic relationship trait. If she wants you to choose between her or the kids, well that’s just silly. Immature. Fifth grade. Don’t do that.

Children are pretty resilient. I know, I have two pre-school age boys and we’ve been through a divorce a few years ago (I kept custody) and now a very happy re-marriage! It was about 2 months before they met her, and it was for an hour at a local playground where the boys and I normally went on weekends. Over time they grew to expect her to be there for dinner, church, etc. and if she went to her church on a certain Sunday, or wasn’t coming over for dinner, they would briefly get upset (until I mentioned she was coming over…say…the next day!).

In deciding to introduce my new partner to my 7 & 11 year old the first thing I considered was how would they react. A few things crossed my mind – how would the children feel if I didn’t introduce them for a lengthy period of time – would they feel excluded, what if I waited until I was certain the relationship would be long term and the children didn’t like him, what was the worst that could happen if I introduced him in a limited way early in the relationship – children have new people come into their lives all the time (friends, teachers, coaches etc). I worried about what would happen if the children did become attached to him and the relationship didn’t last but in the end reminded myself that nothing in life is certain and we would have to deal with that if it happened.

I ended up introducing the boys to my new partner very early in the relationship. The meeting was in their environment so there was a degree of comfort for them. For me the result was positive, I observed positive interaction between my partner and the children which gave me a certain degree of comfort in my new relationship and the children have since been able to build a positive relationship with my partner.

Everyone’s situation of course will be different and the maintenance of a fairly positive relationship with my ex-partner to provide an open, loving and secure support network for the children has I think been key to the children’s acceptance of both of our new relationships.

Normal guy makes the important point to make sure you feel like the relationship is going to be around for a while.

They don’t want to see me being sexual so as long as we give an appearance of it being platonic I would be OK introducing them after a month or so. If you’re lucky/ unlucky enough to have a string of partners I’m not sure that is such a healthy thing so would restrict to those people who are likely to be around for a while.