Need advice on child eating and sleeping habits

[emzybobz1983]

Hi,
This is quite long winded so please bear with me!
I have been with my partner for nearly three years and we live together with my two daughters (7 and 5). Both my daughters have brilliant eating patterns and sleep well in their own rooms with absolutely no issues. I always refused to have children in my bed and so they have never known any different.

My partner has a little boy who will be 5 shortly and who stays with us once or twice a week. He is a lovely wee boy but very delayed in his speech and his eating habits are terrible (yesterday he ate two buttered rolls all day) but is very overweight because his own mum just feeds him junk because "he's just a wee boy and he'll stretch out. By junk I mean a daily diet of bread and choc spread for breakfast, sausage rolls and cake for lunch, chocolate, waffles, chicken nuggets, crisps, more chocolate and 6 pieces of buttered bread. (This horrifies me!)At night my partner has to lie beside him until he is fully asleep and even then he wakes continually throughout the night and screams at the top of his lungs, not crying, just shouting "dad". This results in my partner having no sleep or falling asleep on the floor and the rest of the house being woken all night.
There is no reasoning with his wee boy, he doesn't understand the concept of reason and cannot hold a conversation with him. He seems very behind in development in many ways.
His mum does not recognise anything wrong and sleeps with him in her own bed every night (even getting her own partner to sleep in the spare room to facilitate it!).

I feel there is something deeper here that needs addressed and I'm really stuck as what to do. I love my partner, and his wee boy is great, but we cannot go on like this. I'm starting to dread him coming to our house because of the stress (no matter what we do, the stress outweighs the good stuff).

I'm not in a position to speak directly to his mother and I think both my partner and her are in denial that there may be a deeper issue.

Any advice would be much appreciated!!!

Thanks x

[ZuleikaD]

I'm very sorry, but I'm afraid it's not really any of your business how your partner and his ex choose to bring up their son. I appreciate this has an impact on your life, but you may just have to accept that your partner's ex (and by extension your partner) have very different styles of parenting from you. You could mention that his son seems behind on some of his milestones, but again, it's not really your business. It's not as though he lives with you full time.

[JaneinReading]

Perhaps when the boy comes your partner could share his bed and ensure he doesn't make any noise and does not wake the rest of you up. Also two buttered rolls is awful.

Can you not just put out for him good foods like eggs, veg, fish and leave it to him to see if he will eat it. In time he may come to do so.