Difficulties with my partners child!

[Tankgirl78]

Hiya needing some advice from people who've lived through this experience!
I've been seeing my girlfriend now for seven months, she has a five year old girl and I have a two year old girl. The problem is I'm having real difficulties with her daughter. Now whilst I fully appreciate it is hard for her to adjust to having to share her mum with new people (she's been used to having her to herself for two years now) - her behaviour is becoming intolerable. I need to know a) if it will change b) if so how to change it and c) how much I can/should intervene or d) if I should walk away!
From what I can see my girlfriend has adopted very much a 'guilt' style approach to mothering as she works full time so she has very poor disciplinary techniques (if any), no boundaries, and is totally bossed about by her daughter. Consequently this girl is extremely spoilt, rude, bossy, mean, unkind and selfish. She is almost always horrible to my daughter and it is starting to have an effect on her. I've worked hard to teach my daughter manners, kindness and sharing and it seems to be being reversed now because of the five year olds influence.
It almost goes without saying that she's always rude and difficult towards me and it makes for a really uncomfortable time for all of us.
My girlfriend seems oblivious to the fact that her daughter is like this even though she has to spend a lot of time shouting at her and making ridiculous 'false threats' that she of course never carries out like 'if you don't do this you're not seeing grandpa tomorrow'. All meaningless and useless of course because she never follows through on any of it.
She blames her behaviour entirely on this situation but I think a big proportion of it is her weak parenting. I've gathered that her behaviour was like this before I came along so I know it's not like she was an angel before and is now reacting to me. Do I address this with my GF? So tricky to tell someone their parenting needs improvement but if I don't say anything I can see it will be the death of us.
Please help with constructive comments if you've been though the same thing and something you did worked or didn't work!

I think you should stop seeing your GF when she has her daughter with her. Arrange to see her away from her child. You've only been together seven months - it's probably all too soon. And if you're already viewing your GF as a weak parent with no discipline skills then it's not boding well for a long term future together anyway.

So my advice would be to back off a little and find ways to date her without doing the whole ' kids together thing ' which it's too soon for by the sounds of things.

By the way, it's tricky to criticise someone's parenting so I wouldn't go there just yet if I were you.

I very much agree with HotLips. You've only been seeing each other for 7 months, hardly any time at all. I'm a bit surprised that you are spending time together with both the children already. Can you meet up without the children for a while until you are more certain about the relationship?

I also agree that having such big differences around parenting will be a huge hurdle to overcome if you want a long term, permanent relationship. If you do want to broach it, I would suggest a collaborative and shared approach eg could you both go on a parenting course?

The previous two posters above talk a lot of sense, but if I were you, I would give it up. If you just date casually, that's fine.
Already your little girl is having trouble with the older child, and it is affecting her behavior. Your parenting methods sound very good to me.
But the five year old has had five years of bad parenting and I am not sure that can be overcome. So I would just stop the relationship and enjoy time with your little girl.

Thank you for your advice. I would actually give the same advice as you because of course in many ways you're right! It's just really hard when you are inside this situation.
I really love my gf and we have a lovely time together when it's the two of us and the kids are in bed. Because we are both single parents it's really hard to spend time apart from the kids so that's not really an option.
I just wanted to see what my options were before I completely throw in the towel as as a single parent my options are pretty limited anyway and I don't want to spend my life alone because whoever I'm with isn't perfect. I'd like to try to see if there is a way first as we'd both be heartbroken if we broke up.
I was hoping someone who'd been in this situation might be able to suggest something I hadn't thought of as I really want to give it a chance before I banish myself to a life of singledom!

Have you tried talking it through with your girlfriend, not to criticise her parenting at all, but to share that you want to support her and her daughter so that you can all be happy together. You could seek a counsellor to support the 'talking through' bit if it gets sticky for whatever reason. I wish I had other advice for you. I recognise that you have the best intentions and would like to stay with your gf. I don't believe this 5yo is destined to forever be a difficult child, so don't think you need to call it all off without exploring it a bit more with your gf. Don't stay because you don't want to be single tho. It's far lonelier to be in a relationship that becomes v unhappy than to be single in my experience.