They live with their mother most of the time, they stay with us every other weekend and 6 weeks during the summer.
We deal with her as it comes, I suppose. She's utterly absurd--she's been taking the 5-year-old to a therapist for two years now, for example, not because of any displayed emotional problems but because she wants to
head off any such problems before they occur. And of course ever since she started going, Megan's (my stepdaughter's) manipulation skills have become simultaneously better and totally warped. For awhile she was drawing pictures of herself being sad if she wanted something (trivial things, like dessert or something) because that's how the therapist taught her to communicate. Fortunately we broke her of that habit, but in general I feel it'll be an uphill battle their whole lives trying to do damage control from their mother's actions and make them normal upstanding citizens. Her mother actively encourages her to be passive-aggressive like that, because of course as a child--and a girl!!--she must be too weak to simply speak her mind.
Anyway, I think a lot of the problems come directly from the fact that their mother comes from a very traditional Vietnamese household (and currently lives with them, her mother, grandmother, two sisters, her and the kids all in one house). They are unhappy, to say the least, that the kids are half-white.