There are not many parents of any flavor that have not had to deal with a kid playing both sides against the middle.

Going to one parent when the other has already said no, etc.......

This is not the Skid's playing daddy against you. This is pure cluelessness from your DH and the kids taking advantage of DH keeping his head up his own butt regarding his daughters and their manipulations.

Time to give daddy some clarity. Buy web cams and put them in the areas where the girls play their evil games when DH is out of the room. There is nothing like video to give clarity to the clueless parent of evil spawn.

If you wish to deal with this yourself and deal with it directly get a paddle. Light some little girl ass up and that tends to deal with the evil crap very effectively. It works well for evil little boys too.

IMHO of course.

Good luck.

My SD12 does the same thing...perfect little angel when Daddyyyy's around, perfect little brat when he's not. Drives me up the wall. I am living with a little minion that reports EVERYTHING back to her BM. It is a nightmare.

She's been gone to BM's this weekend but is coming home tonight:( I can already feel the weight coming to rest on my shoulders and neck. Constant headache for the next two weeks until the little minion is gone again.

This is my SD15. She can switch it on and off like a pro. DH knows, tells her to stop, I get an apology followed by a glare. I love the nanny cam idea

The problem with the nanny-cam idea is that it does mean that the SM is now 'proving' to the DH that the skid is/isn't doing whatever.

This puts DH in the power-role of the family.

I think it did work well in Dtzy's situation, and I'm now trying to figure out why. Possibly because SS was doing stuff to her BS's as well, and her 'proof' was also to protect her kids.

What bothers me most about having to prove that you, his partner and an adult, are telling the truth is that it makes it seem that you and he are not a team at all. That he's willing to allow his kids the control in the home is not going to get solved quickly.

I guess he has made a choice - to be his kids' friend above all else. If he's not aware of this choice, or if he hasn't considered the consequences, I think it's time you talked to him about it. Definitely before you have kids together. Being a good dad is so much more than buying stuff for a kid, and I think you want a good dad for your kid.

And in the meantime, the only way to deal with his kids is to treat them as though you are their teacher. Limited authority, limited expectations.

How do you think a teacher at school would handle such rude behaviour? For one thing, the teacher is not worried about hurting a rude child's feelings, nor the feelings of her parent. So you need to just take care of you, set your boundaries, and interact as you see fit.

I think you're in a real bind here because your DH has already moved to phase two in the step-spousal "game", which comes after denial that the skid is being nasty. That is, that DH has moved onto reversal of causation, ie that you are the cause of their abuse of you. Which means that even if you record something nasty on the webcam, DH will manage to convince himself that you provoked this conduct and are the cause of it. Hell, he's so keen to make it work from his pov between you and them that he allowed a situation whereby he drove you along crying whilst they were in the back of the family car and just treated this as normal. This is highly dysfunctional. And how about going over to your own mom's house with them and besieging you there? He must for sure have known that they none of them were welcome at that point? Had I been your mom I would have stopped them at the door and said you had a migraine and were not to be disturbed.
I feel you have a great need to draw up some of your own limits here, and perhaps what is stopping you is fear that your DH will withdraw his love from you -- punish you for not loving these kids who are abusing you/testing you to the hilt. I suspect that subconsciously he is playing along with that so as to keep you serving him emotionally. None of this is healthy for either of you. I would do two things in your shoes. One, the next time one of these skids does anything discourteous whatsoever to you you point it out calmly and objectively, without animus. Describe what they have done, why it is wrong and what they should have done. Then walk away emotionally. So for example, one pulls a snitchy face. You simply say, "You are making an unpleasant expression right now. That is not acceptable given I have just handed you a drink. How you thank someone who hands you a drink is to smile politely." And then secondly, I would tell him you are at the end of your tether and want to go into counseling with him. A good counselor will notice the imbalance of power in your relationship and will work on it together with the both of you.

Also, NEVER put yourself in a position where you are held to ransom by minding the skids whilst DH talks to BM separately. This is outrageous and makes you subservient to them as a couple!!!!! Please don't put yourself in that position.

Hello and welcome! I think you have been given very good advice on setting limits and getting respect. It has to be clear to everyone that there are adults and there are children in this family: adults act together ( you and DH) and set loving parameters for children to follow. No disrespect will be allowed - whatever the reason. You may have to drag your DH to a counselor to get him on the same page.

I agree with Moe and with Poodle about the power dynamics and roles in your family. They need to change. For you to be crying on the way back and for your DH to do nothing - not to stop the car, not to make the skids apologize or take their TV privileges away is outrageous. If they were mine and they made an adult cry, i would DIE of SHAME but not before making sure they regretted it very deeply.

I also have to tell you, it is so typical that things go south after the wedding - same here, and the skids were adults or in high school! It's the BM's influence. She began screeching, as soon as we decided to get married, that DH was abandoning his children. High-conflict, personality disordered women go out of their way to punish the exH for daring to be happy with someone else. Skids become BM's bots, as tog put it - they are collateral damage.

I will bet anything that BM sends non-verbal messages as to what kind of feedback she wants to hear from them when they come back - negative!!! In the Step-mom movie, the little boy says to Susan Sarandon, the BM ( who is conveniently dying of cancer), Mommy, if you want me to hate her ( Julia Roberts, the SM) I WILL!!!

Need I say more...

Good luck! This website will help empower you to demand better treatment. Your DH needs to step up to the plate and discipline his kids.

I know this probably doesn't help much but what I do is add up the days/hours of the year that I have to be with SK (ie. if just EOW then perhaps 52 nights x 24 hours = 1248 hours minus 9 hours of sleep each of those days = just 780 hours left and then I make a list of alone/family/friend things I can do to fill in as much as possible in those 780 hours ie. 5 x haircuts @ 2 hours away). It seems less overwhelming when you can narrow it down to the minimal amount of hours you have to spend in their company, think of it as time to do stuff that then frees you up to enjoy your other alone weekend with DH. That is my coping strategy anyway.

I agree that a webcam is the best thing you can do to "PROVE" your point (sad that you are an adult and have to prove that); however, if you don't have a webcam or if you are somewhere the webcam isn't, break out the cellphone. just pretend like you are texting or surfing the web. you can hold it in such a way so it doesn't look obvious that you are videoing (you could even have it proped up charging or something while you record it). I have done this before in a pinch to prove my point. Again, as an adult I don't think I should have to prove anything, but I would much rather prove myself innocent than let my DH have doubts and wonder. The more a child gets away with this behavior and even has a posibility that Daddy might doubt you over him/her, the worse this will become (and the better they will get at it) so nip it in the bud now. I actually had a few recordings when I sat down with DH and showed him just to prove it wasn't a one time isolated incident. Good luck!