Okay my children have decided they are exhausted and wanted to go to sleep a little early tonight so I am going to get to post now! For those of you who read about my squirts and furs you know I have a 2 year old and a 3 year old. I love them so much but I am really struggling with my daughter who is the oldest.
She is defiant, talks back, argues, screams, yells, anything horrible you name it she does it. Except maybe be physically violent she isn't to bad in those areas. It is bad though I fight with her all day everyday and usually when she goes to bed I am exhausted. This started about a year ago or maybe a little longer but it seemed to follow the pattern of the moon and I always knew when there was a full moon comming because she was absolutely horrible just one of those children you see in the store and say wow my child will never act like that and then when the full moon was over and we were coming down she would sleep so much it was like she was exhausted from acting like that for a week. Well it has progressed and gotten worse and way more frequent now. I know that children her age don't have attention spans and such but when I tell her to look at me she can't even do it for 5 seconds without haveving to look around or when I ask her to stand still she can't for a whole minute. Well anyway we started by being the parents who were not going to spank and that didn't work she used the time outs to plan her next move so after doing that for a few months we resorted to spankings, well she will let you spank her till her bottom is bright red and then look at you and scream in you face or lie or tell you she isn't going to do something, many days it takes me hours to get her to pick up her toys and that is with me saying first pick up all the barbies and put them in this bin and so on, she will just refuse, I don't know how to make her do it. I am so at a loss and my son is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum he does something wrong and all I have to do is look at him and he runs and does right or fixes it or what ever.
Well that being said I had heard about children who have ODD Opositional defiant disorder. I have read up on it and read up on many things about it and if you knew my daughter and read the list of symptoms she fits everyone of them. So anyway, I don't have insurance right now so Ican't take her to the doctor to get fixed and deffinantly believe we would only use medicine as a last resort, if we tried everything else we could do as parents and a family and nothing worked and it was affecting her school work then we might try meds. Anyway one of the big recomendations is having a really good daily routine that children with ODD need to have every minute of their day planned out so they know what is coming next. Well I thought this is great we have a place to start something we can do at home to maybe help us out. Here is the hard part, when I used to work I was so organized and routine and everything had to be perfect but now that I stay home I am just yeah we will get through the day and get things done. So it terrifies me to have to impliment a routine and that is completely oppoisite of my personallity. I pray that the Lord with give me wisdom or send me someone to help me. Ladies if any of you have a routine you would like to share with me and everyone else leave a comment and we will post it up! Have a great day ladies!
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Thank you for stopping by my post at Training Happy Hearts an leaving a comment. It was definitely mean to lead me to this post, which I read and which has me both feeling for you an praying for you. I know how frustrating behavior issues can be as my son has ha his share - which are getting so much better, but which, unfortunately, seem to have rubbed off on my daughter, who, once, ordinarily compassionate, willing to share an sweet at two is turning into a "terrible almost three year old", really testing more, listening less, hitting more, obeying less. It's not what you describe, but it is still frustrating. (My son's a bit more in line with what you describe. In his case, neither time outs nor spanking nor any traditional discipline methods work. We are still figuring out what does. To be honest, it seems, even though he is but 4, reasoning works for him. It's the way his mind works. Also, giving him a full sensory it helps!)
ReplyDeleteWhen we were getting my son evaluated by a neurologist to rule out some things, and, subsequently by an OT, to see if he had SPD, whcih he does, both mentioned Oppositioanl Disorder possibilities. We aren;t looking into that as I have been keying into and working with the SPD thing for now. And it is helping. But, we will be looking into it if need be further own the road.
I will say that I have found that with SPD, there have been great support groups at Yahoo, wonderful books at the library, etc. Maybe for ODD there are, too. So, I encourage you to look for them.
Regarding routine, I used to be soooo goo at it, too, but having two young ones so close in age has thrown me off. Then I hit upon RHYTHM along with routine. basically, I try to keep a RHYTHM (less time-based and more fluid) to our days based around some core events: wake up, breakfast, lunch, dinner and bedtime. Then, I work routines around them (wake up an bedtime ones in particular) Because I am visual and my son benefits from visual schedules even though he is kinesthetic, and b/c I am flexible (read: not goo at keeping routines anymore), I need a visual schedule for our rhythm, but don;t like to have a completely set one. So, I made a movable one, which I posted about at the bottom of this post. The morning pocket charts have gone by the wayside, but the fridge chart is really helping us all still. Some days we pay more attention to it than others, but many ways we use it to refocus, talking about what we have done and what's coming up an giving the kids some choice in which activities to do between meals as long as we get some core ones in. Plus, we have blanks whcih we draw on with dry-erase markers for special events an activities. Remembering to use it helps our days sooo much. I encourage you to find a system that works for you - however simple - and if you want to copy mine, please do. You can print the pics out by clicking on the thumbnails in my post, or email me for Publisher version ones that you can tweak for your own home.
I think this is the longest comment I have ever written.
Best of luck and many prayers!!!!