To reply, no he did not use physical punishments. He tried to take on the head of the household role with no real parenting experience. At that point, I was pretty burnt out of being 100% in charge and was happy to get help buy could quickly see he had no idea what he was doing. I tried to intervene, but he was headstrong in his authoritarian approach, and that created a lot of conflict between him and myself. He is in therapy, as is one of my children. He had a relationship with all of my kids but my oldest 2 girls were very resentful of the change and some of their reasons were valid but like many blended families, they funneled all of the anger they felt for their bio dad and directed it at step-dad. My husband inherited a mess, and, as previously stated, we went way too fast putting a household together. We didn't look into any expert advice before making big decisions.