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[quote=Anonymous]We have a nine year old girl diagnosed ADHD /ODD and undiagnosed anxiety, and for lack of a better description her ADHD manifests like that more typical of boys her age. She is hyperactive and incredibly impulsive. She often ignores instruction and has zero sense of time.

She behaves well at school.

At home, it is a disaster. We are completely overwhelmed, exhausted, and disheartened by her. It's heartbreaking to feel this way about your kid, but there are very few positive moments. She is obnoxious and irritable. She responds unkindly, offers no thanks, is always unhappy with everything. If we ask her to do anything, the answer is always no. We can threaten consequences, and that sometimes works, but feels so negative all of the time. If we do give a consequence, she never, ever learns from it and alter future behavior. Whenever we say no to something, she blows it up in to a huge fight, so we feel that our choices are to either give in to her or face an enormous battle. She has seen four different therapists, done various group and individual therapies and nothing has made any difference. She has very little insight to her own behavior and completely refuses to discuss anything related to. Her behavior or feelings. She takes Focalin and Guanfacine. We tried Ability and Lexapro, which were both disasters.

She had no behavioral issues until she was 5.5 years old, and they have continued to worsen since then. Her anxiety kicked in around 7.5 and has also continued to worsen.

Neurotypical parenting strategies do not work. She has a younger sibling who is manageable, warm, friendly, and kind. We are just really struggling because she is deeply unpleasant kid and we feel so trapped. We are an otherwise healthy family, she has experienced no trauma that we know of, and we just want to feel more positive towards our kid. We are obviously extremely depleted, but of course I also worry about how disregulated she must feel to act in such extreme ways, too. When she has an outburst, she seems psychotic, says terrible things, and makes very little sense.

I'm not really sure what I'm seeking, but i swing between feeling that perhaps we need to offer more structure at home (although I think we feel that we do? She has a pretty routine schedule, but perhaps in misguided attempts to avoid fighting with her we have bent the rules too often?)  to considering institutionalizing her, to trying to convince myself to let it all go and that maybe we are too high strung. Really though, I guess aim just looking for some understanding about really, really hard kids and empathy about how terrible it feels to dislike you kid so often.[/quote]

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