I am so happy I found this site because I personally don't know many people in the variety I find myself in as a step parent. A little bit of my background is that I am 33 y/o and am married for the second time. I have not biological children of my own but my wife has 4, all from different fathers, luckily I either get along with or have no contact with all but one of them. I have adopted her youngest who is 2 and a half and I have been around since she was 3 months old. I don't feel the need for my own biological children and am ok with the fact that she has no desire to have anymore or the ability to have anymore. Now with a little bit of background I will move on to my two biggest issues I am experiencing right now.

My first and most immediately pressing is the situation with my 4 y/o SD whose father is a true and righteous pain in my rear. It is a long ugly story between my wife and him and in a way I can almost say that I understand in some small way his animosity towards my wife. To make a long story short, in the time after the girl was about 8 months old my wife had little contact with her daughter till shortly after we got together, which was at my prompting her to reconnect with the child. To make it worse while she was seperated from her daughter the child's father "forced" her to sign papers giving away most all of her rights, she is not very legal savvy and fell for many of the untruths that he told to get her to sign them, something even he has admitted. When we got tired of him lording over her with these papers we took him to court and when we ran out of money to keep fighting she had 2 hours of supervised visitation every other week.

At first I went with her and had no issue with doing whatever needed to be done but as time went on he became more aggressive about talking to me about all of my wife's faults and was generally nasty. I am pretty good about brushing him off but he was good at pushing the right buttons that any husband would defend his wife against. He left my wife alone because he knew directly inteferring with the visit would give ammo to her when we are ready to go back to court again to take more custody from him. Eventually I stopped going, I like enjoying my days off and no longer was enojoying what was going on during these visits. I also unfortunately, suffer occassionally from some social and public anxiety and these situations make me even more prone to saying or doing something regretful. Today, my wife confronted me about not wanting to go again to the visit, I told her I hate the visits and it ruins my whole day and puts me in a bad mood. She said I wasn't being supportive because she doesn't like being around him either and she would like help with our 2 that she would bring along to see their half sister. Am I wrong in still refusing to go, I so despise these visits, I am supportive with her other kids but I can be honest when I say that I could care less about this one because (whether it be from coaching from dad or on her own) she is very oppositional and down right mean to her mom during these visits.

My second situation involves my 11 y/o step son who lives with us. He lived with his grandmother for the 10 years before my wife and I got married and when he asked to live with us and his grandmother said it was ok I was more than happy to support my wife and let him move in with us. I can't say I honestly have a problem with him per se but their are things that I just don't know what to do to help him. First thing is he is extremely lovey to everyone and it worries me that he is going to be percieved as being inappropriate with other kids and adults, he has already been warned at school for hugging various teachers, I just don't know what to do to help him. The second thing is he is absolutely horrible at school, he is in 6th grade and despite the fact that I actively spend anywhere from 30 minutes to 2 hours helping him with his homework, he still misses assignements because he doesn't bring them home and he has a rough time sometimes with tests, though his tests have vastly improved since I have put time into helping him with his studies. The last thing I wish I could help/do something about is that when we do punish him he seems so emotionally detached that it seems and feels like he just doesn't care and the punishments are ineffective, we than tried pure positive reinforcment basically giving him props for when he did right and just coaching him on things when he did something wrong. Eventually we tried a mix with no effect. His grandmother is no help as apparently she was into pretty nasty physical discipline and as a victim of physical abuse I will not even consider that way.

I appreciate all the help in advance.