While searching for the term "entitled" I found this article, and it sounds so like much like my partners 19 year old son, who has always just wanted his own way and believes he should get what he wants when he wants it no matter how much it might hurt or damage somebody else and who also has no compunction about lying to get his own way.

I did my best for him for 5 years, then I found out that behind my back he was telling lies about me, and manipulating my partners family into believing I was an evil stepmonster. He was chronically indulged by his mother, and when I began questioning the lies he told her all the time he could not cope with me seeing through him. Isn't is strange, that there appears to be that moment when you realise they are lying and manipulating, the scales fall from your eyes and you can never seem them in the old "he is only a child" way again. His other parent also encouraged him in his lying as it fed into his dislike of his ex who had dared to leave him.

I am so totally disengaged from him I probably wouldn't know him if I saw him in the street. I spent two years leaving my home every second weekend when he was around, after he manipulated his father into taking him to live with there by telling lies about little old evil me... Father and son both came to regret that decision I can tell you Best revenge was letting them have each other. Funny enough his father threw him out of the house once he was finished in education, think his new marriage was under threat, I know just how that feels.

However even though he was spoilt, I don't believe that caused the problem, I think he was born with a personality very like his fathers, who was charming, manipulative, a gambler and lier, so in many ways he just has grown up to be his father all over again.

Its just a pity that people like these get to cause so much misery and heartache for the families and unsuspecting people around them... If I had read the book Stepmonster before I had become involved I would have been much less open to attack, though I believe he would still have behaved the same way, its his nature. Anyway, read the article previously posted here and recognise your lovely stepkids. I don't call him my stepkid, he is nothing to me but my partners son, who treats his mother shamefully (No xmas present, birthday present and a very late text on mothers day). I keep saying don't take it personally, he treats everyone badly thats why his girlfriends dump him after six weeks, every time...

THE ENTITLED CHILD...VERY Interesting Read!

Children that are not raised with discipline, not taught respect at a young age, do not earn their way and do not have set limits, are the young adults today who are psychologically damaged, depressed, suffer broken relationships, have no close friends, do not succeed and become drug and alcohol users.

http://www.steptalk.org/node/52029

Jeffrey Zaslow wrote an interesting article in the Wall Street Journal titled, “The Entitlement Epidemic: Who’s Really to Blame,” He notes the cause for the teen to twenty-something generation’s overly inflated sense of self is indulgent parenting.