Marriage & Blended Family Life Coaches | Founders of Blended Family Matters Academy™

Real Families. Real Challenges. Real Solutions.

Hey Fam! We're Tyrone & Jessica Pickens, also known as Coach Ty & Coach Jess! We're husband and wife, parents of six, grandparents, Marriage & Blended Family Life Coaches, and the founders of Blended Family Matters Academy™.

But before all the titles, certifications, coaching and ministry — we're simply two people who have spent more than 20 years learning what it really takes to build a marriage and blend a family.

And best trust and believe...we did NOT have it all figured out!

We met and married in 2002 in less than 90 days of "officially" meeting each other. Yes, you read that right — less than 90 days! Almost overnight, we brought four children, ages five through nine, together under one roof. Then, within the first three years of our marriage, we welcomed two more children.

Just like that, we were a family of eight, raising six children full-time while simultaneously trying to figure out how to be husband and wife, parents, bonus parents, co-parents and one unified family.

We loved God. We loved each other. We loved our children. But love didn't mean we knew how to blend a family. And that's where our real story begins.

We Had Love. We Had Faith. But We Didn't Have a Roadmap.

We did all the things y’all… We met in church. We participated in premarital counseling. We had people who loved and supported us. But…. nobody prepared us for the unique realities of blending a family.

No one sat us down and explained how different parenting styles, expectations, loyalty conflicts, biological and bonus-parent relationships, co-parenting dynamics, past hurts, communication challenges and the everyday pressure of raising six children could affect our marriage and our family.

So we learned a lot of it the hard way.

There were beautiful victorious seasons… and there were some really, really difficult ones where we completely missed it.

We made mistakes. We hurt each other. Our children were drastically, and unfortunately at times, very negatively impacted by decisions we made while trying to figure things out ourselves. We have a hard time painfully admitting that our children unintentionally became collateral damage at times, as we navigated seasons of frustration, disconnection and exhaustion, and even a point when we questioned whether our marriage was going to make it.

That's difficult for us to acknowledge, especially knowing that some of what we didn't know then had consequences for the people we love most.

But that's also part of why we're so passionate about this work today.

Through prayer, counseling, commitment, forgiveness, maturity and a whole lot of learning, we kept choosing to fight for our marriage and our family instead of simply fighting with each other.

More than two decades later, we're still here. Not because we've done everything right. Not because our family has been perfect.

But because we've learned that healthy marriages and strong families require intentionality, humility, grace, communication, boundaries, healing, and in our opinion, likely most important, a willingness to keep doing the work. And we're still doing the work today!

From Our Family's Journey to Our Calling

Over time, one thing became increasingly clear to us: we wished we'd had a roadmap.

We wished someone who understood blended family life had helped us recognize some of the challenges before they became crises. We wished we'd had practical strategies for navigating marriage, parenting, communication, boundaries and family dynamics, alongside the faith that was already foundational to our lives.

That desire eventually became Blended Family Matters Academy™.

Today, as Marriage & Blended Family Life Coaches, we combine our lived experience, coaching training, practical tools and faith-rooted perspective to help other couples become more intentional about their marriages, relationships and families.

Our heart will always be for blended families because that's our story. But we've also learned that many of the challenges we help couples navigate, including communication, conflict, connection, trust, boundaries, parenting, expectations and building a healthy family culture, (just to name a few!) aren't exclusive to blended families.

That's why BFMA also serves traditional married couples and engaged couples who want practical tools and support for building healthier relationships and stronger families.

Meet the Pickens Family

BFMA may be led by Coach Ty & Coach Jess, but our story belongs to all eight of us.

Together, we've raised six children — the four children we brought into our marriage and the two we later welcomed together. They didn't simply witness our blended family journey; they lived it. And their experiences matter.

Our kids are living proof that blended families can make it. They've carried scars, yes… but they've also grown into strong, resilient, compassionate people.

Several of our children have been willing to participate in our conversations and podcast over the years, sharing their own perspectives and experiences because this blended family journey isn't just ours as husband and wife or as parents, it belongs to them too.

Their voices have helped us understand things we couldn't always see while we were in the middle of raising them. They've been honest about what worked, what didn't, what hurt, what they needed from us, and how some of our choices affected them.

And while some of those conversations haven't always been easy to hear as parents, we believe their perspectives are an important part of the story.

That's why at Blended Family Matters Academy™, we don't want to talk about blended family life only from the parents' point of view. We believe there is something valuable to learn from every person who lives the experience, including biological parents, bonus parents, children and even adult children who can now look back and tell us what the journey felt like from their side.

Our family isn't perfect. We've made mistakes, experienced hurt, learned some extremely hard lessons that we are still healing from, and thank God we’ve also grown in ways we never expected.

Through it all, we've continued learning how to move from simply being blended toward becoming truly bonded. And that's the journey we're committed to sharing with other families.