Need help with oppositional child

Another book I'd recommend is "Building the Bonds of Attachment" by Daniel Hughes. I had heard lots of people recommend it for quite a while before I read it (partly delayed because I had to special order it), but it was really really good. It gave very concrete examples of how to therapeutically parent a child, and in a lot of ways you need to think of them as being much younger than their chronological age & treat them accordingly. It is important (as you've recognized) to keep your own perspective and balance and temper and sense of humor in the process. Kids do know how to push our buttons & once you're feeling angry, it's hard to think very clearly, much less come up with imaginative ways to defuse a volatile situation or to redirect that oppositional energy into something better. Hang in there. Best wishes.

I'm glad you liked my article. The basic idea is to make the conflict intra-personal not interpersonal. So, as Lucyjoy suggests, you can let the child walk out with his/her shoes...or even go without all together. An excellent book is Attaching in Adoption by Deborah Gray and also, Your Defiant Child by Barkely regards art

Thank you for the suggestions. I'm reading everything I can get my hands on. I will go to the attachment forums. I am also hunting for a therapist, without much luck so far. There are some areas where I feel like I am getting conflicting information. For example, "Never let the child win." vs "Let it be the child's decision." I do not ever let my child have her own way when she throws a fit. But there are times where there is simply no way to provide her with an alternative choice. The other night, I took her to an ice skating lesson. Afterwards, she wanted chips out of the vending machine. I told her no -- we are having dinner in a little while, and anyway I don't have any small change. I was subjected to a screaming fit all the way home in the car. "You don't love me!". What would have been a good way to handle this? Ask her if she wanted to spoil her dinner? Ignore her screaming at me in heavy traffic? What would you do? I tried saying things like "of course I love you, but we are having dinner soon, so how was the ice skating, etc.", that didn't work. All she heard was "blah blah blah NO." So then I told her if she doesn't stop that right now, she is not going to go ice skating next week. But that consequence is just too far in the future to be, well, consequential. So now I am wondering if ice skating is just too much for her. Like maybe she is being over-stimulated and we should cut back. But on the other hand, structured activities are supposed to be good for a child like this, and ice skating is definitely a structured activity. Again, I feel like I am confused by reading conflicting advice. Anyway I spent the rest of the evening resentful and grouchy because after all that driving and money spent and waiting in the cold arena, my reward for this activity is getting yelled at. And trying to hide my feelings of resentfullness and grouchiness is making me feel sick inside.

If this is a habitual occurrance, definetly no ice skating. I would have told her to put her hand over her mouth, if she didn't, loud singing and radio and ignore it until I got home and could deal with it. I probably would have fed her a quick dinner and sent her straight to bed assuming and saying empathetically that she must be very tired from all that screaming. I would have only said no with no explanation when she first asked for the chips and any reponse/sass back or attitude would have been greeted with a question "What did I say?" I would have ignored the you don't love me or answered one time, 'I'm sorry you feel that way" That's what the no battling and not letting the kids win is. It's hard to argue with yourself. When giving choices, they are your choices which would both be agreeable with you. If she chose a third choice, it indicates that she is not yet ready to make any choices and it is complicated when your trying to learn everything and deal with it at the same time.

I know exactly what you mean about that feeling of being sick of hiding your feelings! And feeling unappreciated & that you're doing all this for your child, just to get yelled at. I think you have to find a way to pull back in your head, sort of like an out-of-body experience, and see it more objectively like you were floating above it all -- here's a kid who obviously is not able right now for whatever reasons to keep her act together. You're really right that when she gets to the point of being totally irrational and carrying on, there's no point in offering her choices or trying to deal with her logically. She's past being able to calm herself down to actually behave. I think you just have to say, ok, no chips because I'm being a good mom to you by planning good food for you to eat instead. And then shut your ears to the rest of her histrionics, and picture her as more the emotional age she seems to be -- like a tired two-year-old. It could be the ice skating is too much stimulation for her, or too much stimulation that particular day. Routines really seem to help, I think, and the more times you say no as you try to breeze past the vending machine without buying anything, eventually that's not the battle she'll pick. I really do feel for you though. I know I get impatient with having to hold back on exposing my child to things that I always think she'll enjoy if she just would not get so overwhelmed. That book "Building the Bonds of Attachment" describes a sort of attitude to cultivate as the parent in this situation, where you need to not feel invested emotionally in the outcome of how she behaves, but to have a loving curiosity about how she is going to act instead. And to just stay the course, hold on, keep doing all the structured type routines & boundaries & limits that you are already doing. Eventually she'll be able to take more freedom & run with it instead of falling apart with it.

No, it is not a habitual recurrance, thank goodness. I kind of hate to give up the ice skating, because she is such an active, intelligent child. I feel like she needs the athletic challenge. My instinct tells me it is good for her. Of course, my instincts seem to be wrong a lot lately. Here is another example. This one happens A LOT. Darling daughter disrupts dinner, in creative ways. Interrupting conversations, waving silverware around, slouching, dropping things, mashing food into the tablecloth, getting up for some unrelated reason, like to look at a book or something. The conversation tends to go like this: "Please sit up and eat your dinner". "I don't like it". "Fine, than you may leave the table". "No, I'm hungry!" "Either eat nicely or leave the table" "Fine!" (disruptive activity continues). "That's enough, please leave the table now." "OKAY! I WILL!" Then she stands in the hallway and yells and cries until I get up and physically carry her to her room, or I just give up, eat a few more bites, and leave the table myself. This is really hard on my whole family. We need to be able to eat meals without all this conflict. Any suggestions?

I find the washing machine doesn't care what kind of manners my child has so if they can't use table manners, they are welcome to eat in the laundry room. I don't like it, remove the plate-maybe breakfast will appeal to you more(it won't take her too long to figure it out). If the weather is nice, I'v also let them eat outside so we can eat in peace-just don't treat it like a reward. All of this must be done without anger or emotion except for empathy.

Yes, that is the problem. I have emotions other than empathy. I would find it very hard to get up from the dinner table and put a screaming child in the laundry room without feeling frustrated, angry, sad, depressed, annoyed, angry, etc. I have feelings. So much of what I read seems to say I must not exhibit any negative feelings. That is so hard to do. Squash my feelings in a little ball and never let them show. I know a lot of this is MY problem, not my daughter's. I have feelings from my own childhood. My parents were control freaks (I think the technical term is narcissistic personality disorder), and I was so relieved to get away from that environment, and spend all those years in a calm, loving, happy relationship with my husband and son, and now I am dealing with similar control tactics in my daughter, and I feel like I am reliving the hell of my own childhood. All this illogical confrotational stuff is really hard for me to take, because I lived through it once before. I feel like a cancer survivor getting a second diagnosis of cancer. It feels that bad. I'm sorry to vent like this. I'm really trying to do things right. I'm really trying not to let her goad me into emotional confrontations. But I don't always succeed. Sometimes, I am ashamed to say, I yell back.

Being able to get to you or push your buttons feeds the disorder. I share my feelings with other moms and my husband-not just forget them. And it takes practice. You cannot do everything at once. And, If you immediately remove her to the laundry room with her food at the first sign of trouble, likely she'll catch on fairly quickly. You need to make sure you're taking care of yourself as well.

Lucy, thank you. I am sharing my feelings with you. My husband understands but is tired of the subject. The other mom's can't see what the problem is. She does so well at school and all. I agree, I can't let her push my buttons. I'm just not doing a very good job of that right now. It's funny, before I adopted, I saw myself as a competent, sensible person. All it took was 35 pounds of strong-willed kindergartner to shatter my illusions about myself. Now I see myself as a high-strung idiot. Thanks for understanding. I will try harder to distance myself emotionally from her abusive spells. That does seem to be the key thing I'm missing.

Desert Mom, I hear you!! It is exhausting and hard to find people who understand the stress it causes. I also have a strong willed 6 yr old doing many the same things are you daughter. I was beginning to think we both needed therapy but than I started to talk to other parents with bio kids and they are having these same problems. Alot seems to just be the 6 yr old brain, and their developmental need for independence now. This of course has muddled my understanding of what is an attachment/adoption issue with just being 6. I swear 3 months ago, she was a doll, and now at 6 she can be a witch. I started a chart and believe me I never believed in this stuff. Just put you shoes on, eat your breakfast etc. - this shouldn't be arguement - she had been doing this for many years why fight now? I'd be at the bus stop brushing her hair and shoveling donuts in her mouth just so she wouldn't go to school hungry and looking like a wreck. I put simple things that were source of arguements - breakfast, brushing teeth, brushing her hair, taking her medicine, going to school without crying ( and she loved school just cried anyway), going to sleep on time. Simple things that I don't truly believe need to be rewarded - just need to be done. Happy face if she did it, frown if she didn't. Collect enough happy faces and we'd go to Chiuck E Cheese. Well in her true rebellious spirit we had a week of frowns on the refrigerator and being denied a trip to ChuckE and she realized I was serious. In a week she was vying for more smiles and trying to do more (cleaning, helping cook dinner) to get more smiles to make up for some not-so-stellar behaviour. After about 4 weeks most of the small things are no longer an arguement. And I don't mind the weekly/biweekly trips to Chuck E. there if it keeps her motivated. However now that some of the smaller fights are resolved, I am tackling the bigger ones - sit nice at the table, backtalk, picking up her things - a few at a time. The one thing I did notice is the big things are not cured by the chart at all. Though it keeps us calmer becuase we haven't been fighting all day now over the stupid stuff and we can deal with them in a different manner. As for the vending machines- I hate them! I have started leaving my purse in the car during swim/dance lesssons to avoid those meltdowns- so the answer is no I don't have money with me, you'll have to wait until we get home. Hang in there, I hear it gets better :)

I wasn't sure where to post this. I have a 10 year old (11 in April) who, when she gets frustrated (ESPECIALLY when doing homework), cries. And yes, we've tried ignoring it AND telling her to stop. She already gets lots of homework help (tutoring at school in the morning and mom and dad at night), but that's not the issue I want to discuss here--the issue is the crying. Yes, it's lessened since she came to live with us (a year ago), but she can still turn on the tears, and carry on for quite awhile. Any suggestions?

If she's been in the system for 9 years she probably has several issues that may be going on here. The main thing is that you cannot fix this by attempting to stop the behavior or address the behavior. Focusing on the surface issue will just not help. You have to address the affect driving the behavior. It is the cause or motivation of the beahvior that is key. So, for example, if her tears are caused by being overwhelmed because of a sensory-integration disorder, then you will need the help of an SIPT certified OT. If her tears are caused by a core sense that nothing matters and she cannot do anything, caused by a chronic history of maltreatment, then you have to address that. If the tears are caused by being distracted and unable to concentrated because she has a neurological disorder, such as ADHD, then medication and social interventions are appropriate...if the frustration is caused by a learning disability or a deficit in Executive Functions, then learning interventions are necessary. I could go on, but you get the point. It would be most useful to have her evaluated so determine what are the issues going on here so that you can help her solve the underlying problem. good luck

Who would do the evaluation? She sees a therapist once a week.

Desert Mom, Another useful book/audio tape is 'How to Talk So Kids Can Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk' by Faber and Mazlish. Between that and the Love and Logic book/audio tapes (I like all the tapes better than the book, because of being able to hear the proper tone of voice to use), I got along real well with my defiant foster daughter. (But I had also read The Explosive Child and The Defiant Child, so I might have been doing stuff from those books too). The 'How to Talk So Kids Will Listen..' book explains how to reflect what a child is feeling so they feel understood even if you won't give them what they want. When they feel understood, they don't resist as much. For example, if they want a vending snack after ice-skating the parent would reflect back the feeling the kid is having: 'you are really hungry after all that exercise', 'you are so hungry you wish you could have something to eat right now instead of waiting until we get home and have supper', etc. Also sympathetically wishing they could have what they want might help, I don't remember the book and it was about adult communication but it would probably apply to kids, it had an example of a woman whose first husband when she admired clothes in a store window he would get mad and nasty 'you want to waste all our money on yourself! you don't need that!', but the second husband would say things like 'I wish I could afford to buy it for you, it would look great on you!'. I've used that kind of stuff with my fd's, such as in Walmart if they wanted something I'd say 'I wish you could have it and I wish I could have these other things, I'd like to have one of everything!' and that never failed to..well, it seemed to bore them..but probably they just recognized that they weren't going to get it when I'm blathering on about wishing we could have it. The Love and Logic book/tapes are very good about explaining how to remove oneself from the problem (not have to feel angry/frustrated/etc) and put the problem entirely on the child. They use a lot of statements like 'That will be really sad for you' (everything said in a very kind tone of voice, not sarcastic), 'how do you plan to handle that?', 'just because I love you does that mean I have to put up with <fill in the blank>?', and they use logical consequences. Such as, when my fd refused to leave the room so I could change my clothes after work, I said (very sympathetically), 'gosh that will be sad for you, my time is being wasted so I can't get as many chores done, so you will have to make up the time for me', then 'gosh, this is so sad for you, it has been 3 minutes already' and 'oh poor kid, its been 7 minutes now, I sure hope you like doing chores', etc. She went up to 10 minutes the first time that happened, but after having had to 'make up my time' doing chores, then the time she would waste dropped to 2 to 3 minutes a couple times, and after that she would respond within seconds, all I had to do was look at my watch and cheerfully (because I was going to get some chores done for me) announce I was timing her.