Step Families Support Group

sounds like the BM doesn't want to share her daughter with you and wants to control what her daughter thinks. My SD has been pretty brainwashed by her mother and my husband's mother, too, and there wasn't much I could do about it. it pretty much took my SD realizing that her mother and grandmother aren't the angels they tried to make out to be and that I wasn't the wicked bitch I was made out to be. Now that my SD is living w/her GM, she's been getting her eyes opened.

I would suggest just keeping an open relationship with the youngest as much as you can. If she's a smart kid, she start realizing that you're not as bad as the BM implies. Whatever you don't, don't stoop the the BM's level-it'll martyr the BM in the daughter's eyes if she's a momma's girl.

This is a tough situation. We have 5 kids with 2 different non-custodials so it could be a real zoo if we didn't have a schedule & stick to it. What we ended up doing was showing the kids the agreement. We printed out a calendar which we marked to match the agreement. We gave 1 to the kids & 1 to the mom in front of the kids. We kept a third on on the refrigerator. Mom tried saying "this is only if we can't agree". We said "We can't."

The mom was so random the kids never knew what was up until the last minute. This causes anxiety in the kids. They like to know what's going on. Plus they get anxious over the potential for conflict. Although this seemed rigid at first for us too, the kids loved it and the anxiety went way down. At first mom asked the kids to ask us for a lot of exceptions, but we consistently told the kid "if she wants to discuss this, she can call us. Unless she does (which she never did), you will be with us. We also pointed out to the kids where it said in the agreement that parents would not use the kids as middle-men. We gave another copy of the agreement to the mom "she must have lost her copy if she's confused about this".

I don't think this was ideal. Would have loved open communication with a lot of flexibilty but the reality is that wasn't going to happen, and the kids needed more certainty and less drama.

Good luck with this.

I have a similiar situation. My husband has 4 kids with visitation, 1 adult child from another relationship. The oldest of the 4 is a mama's girl, a teenager & hasn't liked me since day one! The BM is ridiculously jealous of our family. Her mother uses the daughters attitude against her father and I. Everythings my fault, and I'm also the reason for not visiting.(As if things were just perfect before me!) To make sense of it, the BM is probably jealous & if she's jealous of you she isn't going to have anything supportive to say to the daughter regarding you therefore supporting a negative relationship with her father & yourself. How to deal, I don't know. We always say we hope they will be able to judge for themselves someday who we really are as people and not whatever has been put in their minds by their mother.