We have been lucky in living fairly close to dhs family and having them on hand to drop in with baby sitting , FIL especially has saved our skins a couple of times lending a hand with chicken pox etc. He has always been pretty dismissive of our requests like not giving sweets, no fizzy drinks - to the extent that he purposefully do things just because we told him not to.
We've managed around this by providing snacks, and acknowledging that a can of fanta is not going to permanently harm them, but over time there have been lots of other small instances (not much individually, but altogether they are worrying) where I can't trust him. These have ramped up from ignoring the snacks and still giving sweets to when baby sitting taking small amounts of money, drinking set aside drinks when asked not to touch, and when offered the use of fridge and freezer for knocking up a meal used specially saved up for expensive cuts of meat.
These are done on purpose, and to an extent we've ignored as the kids have fun with him. But we no longer ask him to babysit and he doesn't have them on his own.
Over the past year FIL has become more contrary and at gatherings he is downright prickly and unpleasant to everyone, constantly dismissive or ungrateful especially to the people who are hosting- both me and dh have stayed out of it as the beef is usually with bil or sil.
Things have come to a head in the past few months with FIL turning up and asking to borrow money from family - he has form for this and then avoiding/ not paying it back - dh will not lend him a thing now on principle. SIL particularly worried about FIL health as he isn't taking care of himself, not washing, is drinking more and thought he was taking legal highs. He also turned up her work asking for money as he needed to pay someone off.
DH thought it would be good to invite everyone round for an evening especially as he hasn't seen his dad in around 6 months, FIL kept stepping outside for a smoke but there was an odd chemically smell, he barely spoke apart from trying to pick arguments with people and was the most hostile I've ever known him to be - I actually feel like he hates us and was literally just here for what he could get rather than enjoying a family get together.
At the end of the evening dh was fuming and wants to never invite him here again, I feel like banning people from our home is actually pretty childish - but can't think how else to support dh.
With the world cup we were looking forward to having family round, to purposefully cut out one person feels very wrong.
Does anyone else have an insight as to how we can manage this?