My stepson (6) doesn't want to spend time with us.

I'll try to be as short and as concise as I can about what I view as a somewhat complicated situation (families are complicated! Who knew!)My stepson is 6 and lives with my husband's ex-wife and her current wife. My husband and his ex divorced when the child was 1 because, well, she's a lesbian and he's not a woman. When they divorced my husband was in the military and his job required him to be ready to respond at any time. Therefore it was best for them to let his ex-wife have most of the custody and she moved across the country with J. I met my husband around the same time she met her new wife. the kid, we'll call him J, was turning 3. When I met him they had a really good relationship. He would go visit J and stay on their couch whenever he had leave and would video chat constantly. However, things went downhill when the military sent us to Japan. We had requested a base near J and were told that it was pretty certain we would get it. My husband and I were given the choice of him going unaccompanied to Korea or us getting married and going to Japan. The time difference made it really hard to consistently videochat, his ex wife acted as if it was our choice to move to another country, she returned christmas presents from us and my inlaws for credit to buy him other things without telling us, she wouldn't let J come visit us, and it was extremely hard for us to come to visit him. We saw him right before we left for Japan and again for a week a year later. It was extremely hard for my husband to not see his son. So hard that he petitioned the military to either transfer him or let him out the entire time we were there. They finally let him separate and we left two months shy of our two year mark in Japan.We have now moved to a three hour drive away from J, with new jobs and a house. We plan on going to court to get more visitation that we currently have because his ex wife has proven to be very unreliable on allowing us access. His ex-wife has been difficult the entire time but lately has been surprisingly cooperative and was agreeable when we asked for J to come visit us for the fourth of July. She offered to let us have him for an entire week. We were ecstatic. We had made J a room that we thought he would like. We bought toys and books and put up a swing in the yard. We had a scooter that my MIL had bought him for our house. I had twenty million activity ideas for keeping him busy. We had asked him if there was any food he wanted us to have ahead of time so we bought everything he named.The entire trip was extremely challenging. He is 6 and when we returned him to his other two moms they did agree that he has gotten sassy since he started kindergarten so at least it wasn't just us. He would complain about a lot of things. He didn't want to go out in our backyard (we have a very large yard out in the sticks while he lives in a HOA manicured neighborhood) citing ants and 'Pokey weeds' as the reason(we don't have very many of either of those things), he didn't like that we limited the amount of tv time he got and even though there is a tv in his room (because it is also our guest room when he is not there) we wouldn't let him use it because he was there to spend time with us and not alone in a separate room. He made many, many comments about how he wished that we had neighborhood kids to play with. He would constantly say that we should go buy him foods and toys that we didn't have at our house. And constantly talked about how we should have taken him to disney or on a cruise (like mom and mommy do). We figured it was just because he's six and he'd never been here before.He seemed to get frustrated with us pretty easily when he would ask us to do something for him and we would make him try it himself before we helped him. Example: He had named some toy dinosaurs and wanted to write down the names. He wanted us to spell everything for him. When I asked him how he thought something was spelled and to try to sound it out and we would help him correct it if it was wrong. And he got really mad at us for that. He threw himself down on the floor when I wouldn't draw a transformer car for him because I didn't know what it looked like and he did. He would also refuse to try things and when we asked him why his response would be "because I've never done it before" Example: He asked us to get Guess Who and the one we got was different than the one he has at his other home so he didn't want to play it.He would say really hurtful things to us that we would calmly explain to him that it wasn't nice to say but would continue saying them. He constantly would say "my family" to mean mom and mommy and not us. Example: "I want to have fourth of july with my family not you" The third of July he had a total breakdown and started crying during his nightly video chat with his (bio) mom about how he wanted to do all the stuff that we had planned for the fourth of july with mom and mommy and not us. Luckily his mom was on our side and told him that he was hurting our feelings and that he gets to spend so much time with them that they can do all these activities together any time but he couldn't always do them with us. He then decided to cry about how he thought we wouldn't let him call them if he asked (literally any time of the day we let him call them and the only time we said he had to wait was when we were in the middle of doing an activity and he got to call immediately after the activity was over). We sat him down the next day and explained how we had quit our jobs in Japan and moved here to be with him and that is why we hadn't been around as much before and that we were all equally his parents and that's why saying we weren't his family hurt our feelings and he mostly stopped doing it but he didn't stop saying he'd rather do stuff with mom and mommy and not us.The last night he was there he talked back to me and was put into time out while we made dinner. It was the only time he had been outright mean/rude in an obviously intentional way and the only time we had to put him in time out. My husband went to go talk to him about his behavior and why it wasn't okay and that he owed me an apology. He started crying and saying that he was a bad kid and that he didn't deserve love. We thought it was just a child being dramatic. He calmed down and apologized, we ate dinner, watched a movie, had a really pleasant last evening. Then when I was getting ready to put him to bed and read him stories he started crying out of nowhere saying that he didn't think I accepted his apology and that he didn't deserve forgiveness and bringing up something he had gotten a verbal warning for the day before as reasons he was a bad kid that could never be good and that no one loved him. He didn't want his dad to see him crying at first but he ended up crying for a really long time. We asked him if he felt like that a lot and he said all the time and we asked if he had ever told mom and mommy and he said no because he was embarrassed. He also didn't understand why his dad and I didn't spank him when he had been rude to me. (we don't believe in it and even took a class on base in Japan about how to parent without spanking). The next morning went really well with one last breakfast and I had stayed up til midnight the night before to make a scrapbook of photos from that week for him to take with him. We told him all he had to do was ask if he wanted to talk to us on video chat.When we dropped him off we talked with his other two moms and they were shocked by the break down and agreed that he doesn't like to make mistakes and that he feels extremely bad when he makes them. That he had a tantrum at school over not being able to do something correctly. All four of us agreed that he should talk to a child therapist about this because clearly the kid needs some coping skills. Now that it's the end of July his mom was talking to my husband and she told him that she and her wife have tried to prompt J to videochat with us. Saying "you can call dad and [me] whenever you want and it'd be nice if you talked to him now" and he'll decline and go back to whatever he was doing.I know he's a child and doesn't know how hurtful he's being but it is really affecting my husband and I. I've suggested that maybe, because contact with him was so haphazard while we were in Japan, that it would really help if we sent a weekly video chat date with him, say Sundays at 6pm, to keep consistency and work our way back to where we were previously. If anyone has any input on either the fact that he doesn't seem to like us or on how to deal with his anxiety about mistakes I'd really appreciate it.TL;DR my husband and I had to spend 2 years in Japan away from our son/stepson and now he doesn't seem to like being around us and says he'd rather do things with his other two moms and doesn't want to videochat with us. He got really frustrated with us during a visit for asking him to try new things even if he might make a mistake and seems to be a really anxious kid. Don't really know how to handle any of it. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2uYnXNG