Mon - sit him down and say....

You treat Chucky the same way you treat the girls, if the girls does something wrong, you teach them to do the right thing, thus is Chucky does something wrong, you have to teach him the correct way.... or you simply leave me to teach Chucky and if he screams at me YOU ARE NOT MY MOTHER, then it's your duty to take Chucky and give him time out or at least tell him, you will not scream and shout at any adult in my house.... small steps friend small steps...

H saying he's scared to loose Chucky if he starts parenting, smile and say - Well Numpty - you have to choose, are you going to be fair and parent your son or are you going to loose me and the girls?

Mon, he's pretty clear about it. He isn't willing to face Chucky's displeasure. It's really too bad, because being ok with your kid's negative emotions is an absolute requirement to raising them well.

So he does what he needs to do to avoid parenting. Doesn't see the dirt. Doesn't see the bad behaviour. Doesn't know what to do. Doesn't take action. Just... doesn't.

I hope, for the sake of Miss P and Baby D and most of all, you... that he DOES for you guys.

Do you think any of it might be gender-related, as I'm just realizing you and the girls are all, well, girls?

Hey Mon,

I don't post often, but your post resonated with me. I am a SM but also a SD. My dad was remarried, had stepdaughters of his own and a biological daughter. I might have/may have felt like Chucky perhaps feels. (It is impossible to say; however, I will tell you how I felt growing up.)

My dad thought I would never amount to much. I always had the impression that off all the "girls" he thought I would be the crack addict. He never said this, it was always just in the background. He never took time with me, never planned things with me. When summer visitation came, his daughters had basketball camp and cheerleading camp and I had... the TV. (This very well could have been their mother's influence and not my father's. Looking back on it, that is quite possibly the case.). He showed them how to do things, talked to them, had a relationship with them, and I was just... there.

I really resented it, but did not have the words to verbalize WHY I felt marginalized. It was impossible for me to pinpoint why I felt so badly. And I took it out on the SM. My father never really said things bad about me directly, it was about my "parenting" or how I was "different" because of where I lived, etc. I always felt BAD while I visited and the much much lesser of my father's children. And as an adult, about to graduate with my doctorate, I still do. It never has gone away.

As an adult, my dad and I never really had much of a relationship. Just recently we have and I love him immensely, but I am still always trying to be the BEST daughter. Trying to show him that I deserve his love. I finally asked him about it, if he had less expectations of me, and he couldn't really admit it, but did by his lack of a response.

Just another viewpoint. And HUGS

Monchichi, I identify so much with your situation.

My SS is a poopstorm, as well. SS has speech issues and fine motor delays, but nothing that can be officially diagnosed by a doctor. The developmental ped told us that we will likely have to wait until the wheels fall off until anyone does anything with the kid to help him. BM isn't interested in doing anything to help him, because it's her baaaaayyybeeeee. There's no discipline, no consequences. He's told over and over that he walks on water. SD is treated like refuse and literally instructed to cater to his every whim.

Perhaps not surprisingly, BM has also done heavy PAS. She backed down when we called out the behavior with the courts, and I think her DH got tired of having him there all the time. DH struggles to parent SS during his parenting time--he, too, lives in fear that his kids won't want to visit if he parents the way he should. And he feels like a prison guard, which takes away all the joy of being a parent. It's really terrible to be a proper parent to a child when you only have 35% parenting time, and the other parent (and in your case Unikitty, too!) undermines you always.

I, too, am a fixer. I spend enormous amounts of time trying to figure out what's wrong with this kid and how to help DH, too. It's useless. There's nothing I can do. There's probably nothing can do. EOWE and a month in the summer isn't enough to fix this kid, as long as there's the influence of his horrible mother.

We focus on how to make it less hard for DH, which isn't like real parenting. We have different standards for SS than SD or DD, and we have to be OK with it. It feels weird, but it's what we have to do to survive.

We take SS's issues one at a time--Disrespect was where we started, and it was the only thing we dealt with for a long time. Specific instructions (say hello when you enter a room, look people in the eyes, no talking back, etc.) and hard consequences have helped some, but DH is the only one to do any of it. I call out the behavior and he deals with it. He's not even 100% reliable with it, but at least it's better than nothing. And I do nothing for SS. For me to do anything for him just provokes a punishment because he literally cannot be respectful of me.