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| I guess I'm getting what I deserve, because I never had much sympathy for parents of kids who threw temper tantrums. Lack of discipline at home or poor parenting would probably be what I thought when I saw someone unable to control their kid.
Now I realize that might not have been the case at all. My oldest is 4 and has been a difficult child since he came out of the womb(and I mean that literally). We(wife and myself) were worried it was something that we did something wrong in raising him to have him turn out this way. But our second boy came along and is the opposite end of the spectrum and we treated them both the same. So I guess it wasn't us....
The defiance is just UNREAL. To a point that I don't know how to stop it. Nothing we do seems to work. Bribes, rewards, threats, punishment, raising voices, getting ignored, spanking. We've tried about every technique you could think of and it doesn't seem to even make a dent. Most of it stems around the potty training now and its been 1.5 years of knowing where to go and how to do it, but he refuses to go when asked....no matter what. Some things work for a day or two, but the effects quickly wear off. My wife is incredibly strong here, but some days she just about starts to cry the defiance over potty training is so overwhelming
Once you take the nuclear option of spanking....where do you go from there? Its a good thing we have self control, because I think these are the kinds of kids whose parents might start to beat them when they are at their wits end. I just have never seen anything like this before, I certainly wasn't like this. Defiant from time to time, but I'd have never stood there and yelled at my dad defiantly AFTER I just got spanked.
Hypersensitive, hyper-emotional defiance would be how I'd describe it. We thought he might grow out of it once he was better able to understand and control his emotions, but its almost getting worse. I'm very concerned about him being accepted at school by both the teachers and the kids. And for the rest of his life if this doesn't stop its going to turn out badly for him.
We know what he enjoys, so we have always tried to use carrots and sticks to entice him to obey, but sometimes he will refuse a reward, or demands the reward without obeying. He's just all over the place and so a routine is impossible. Its been 1.5 hours of carrying on about turning on a video game. I was letting him play for a while, but his mother said he needed to take a potty break(because he will just wet his pants standing there). He refused and the game got shut off....And its been 1.5 hours of a continuous fit(screaming and crying) demanding I turn the game back on....having never went potty. This is a typical day.....how do you reach them?
We are in territory here that I, nor our own parents ever had to deal with to give advice. I just don't know what to do with a child this defiant. And my wife has always stayed at home to raise them, he didn't learn this from daycare. He just does it all on his own.
Edited by 00rooster 11/15/2015 12:30
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I now sympathize with parents of "difficult" children
