Sure, I can help you with it (and thanks for commenting in the way you did). I noted that this was the tip of the iceberg, I was using a few things about the care and feeding of SS15 (SS10 at the time) to explain the parenting style of the adults who raised him, and my running head on into it, in a failed attempt to change any of that.

You're right about how I should not care what he eats. Not sure if it's judging (though we can always say any kind of opinion or discernment is "judging" - but at the same time, it sure feels good to let go of all of that), but for sure I thought it was my (step)parental role to see that he ate nutritious food, and there were many dramatic uproarious scenes at the dinner table, trying to make SS eat just one carrot or one piece of meat, instead of the various microwaveable kiddie meals that were his basic diet (and candy, chips and popsicles for breakfast).

But, I end up taking your viewpoint, just from the sheer pointlessness of trying to do anything about it, and SS15's hostility toward even basic household rules (he'll fight his mother on it too). But I do think there are some step parents with more middle-of-the-road situations who can step in there, and should, because just letting your kids do whatever they want is not a good formula for raising responsible soon-to-be adults.

Also, some of the things do work to change SS15's behavior for the better when all the adults are in agreement on it. DW would never work with me to remove all junk food from the house and to tell him, this is what's for dinner, and if you don't eat it, you're not getting anything else. I told DW that hunger would soon kick in and do for him what all the begging and pleading would not do - he might not eat everything, but for sure he's going to pick something and eat it, because that's how hunger works. DW refused and said that was cruel.

But SS had to stay at his uncle's house for a week (two years ago) and his uncle announced: we all eat the same thing here and we're not going to make anything special for you, so if you don't eat what's for dinner, you don't get anything to eat. SS came back from the stay at his uncle, eating steak. He got real hungry, so he ate steak, and discovered he liked it.

This is really not about food. It's easier to talk about this than the dozens of ways he is rude, cruel to his mother, etc. and etc. (None of this behavior became apparent until we started living together. When I say I should have seen it coming, I mean I should have realized there is a lot more to it, when I saw the things I mentioned going on.)

As far as me hating him, if he ever brings this behavior outside of the home, and say, hurts other kids, those parents are not going to say he's basically a good kid at heart and don't say negative things about him. This kid's situation is extreme. Disengaging has really helped me and there is a measure of peace in the home. SS15 directs all of his anger, and tactics to control, dominate and manipulate, at DW and I do not step in and she is now beginning to stand up to him, a little. I see that no other way is going to work.

I don't know if I've answered all of your questions. It is a growing phenomena, there are more and more of these families, and there are real issues.

I agree. I would have been good to evaluate DW's parenting skills (even mine), but that's water under the bridge now. An interesting thing I overheard once, shortly after getting married to DW, was a woman telling her coworkers in a cafeteria all about the marriage counseling she went through before marrying her husband, and she wondered why none of her friends had ever done it. (It was something with the Catholic Church, called "Pre-Cana." I don't know much about what's involved, but from what she said, I got the general idea. It would take sitting down with a person who was skilled at going to these areas in your life.

Someone here on the forum said I might need to say to DW, "Do you want to stay married, or do you want to continue to not parent your child?" Even if I don't say those words to her, this is the basic issue - and this agrees with your comment about the "no matter what other benefits there are to being with an unskilled parent... those benefits eventually crumble under the weight of living with a poorly parented child."

That's exactly what I did. When I first saw the kid, I thought, I'll deal with it later, when we start living together. I did not know what other things were going to be included along with it. Many of them are little things, but they are continual - it's death by a thousand cuts. That is, none of the cuts are fatal in and of themselves (though some come close), but the accumulated injury of them is fatal.

That's how it is with the junk food. SS had a sore throat once and the doctor said that the infection was lingering because there was so much sugar in his digestive tract that it was like a petri dish for the bacteria to live, grow and thrive in.

Yes, that's it. They think you're picking on them, and your SO thinks that you're being mean to the kid. So, what have you decided to do?