Reply to “I don’t want to behave like this anymore”…helping our explosive 8 year old

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[quote=Anonymous]Sorry, OP, we know how hard this is. I could have written this exact post 5-6 years ago—the younger sibling, the physicality, the complaint about the perceived unfairness that led to it all, and the post-meltdown recognition that something is wrong/desire not to have this happen.

It took a lot—time, money, tears, nearly tore our marriage apart—but things have gotten SO much better. Ours is 13 now. There’s light at the end of the tunnel.

You’ve gotten some good advice here, I’d add just a few things:

Relentless trial and error. On meds, therapies, daily structure, techniques during meltdowns. It’s anecdotal, but in retrospect I feel like we knew if something was helping or not within a few weeks. If not, move on.

Proper diagnosis is essential. It’s really difficult, there are very good and caring doctors who may miss things. For us, it was finding a doctor who diagnosed ASD in addition to ADHD and some ancillary stuff. It explained so much more, helped us identify techniques that actually help, set us on the right path for meds and therapies, helped us target the right school environment. All of those are critical.

The same effort you devote to helping the older sibling needs to be devoted to protecting the younger one. We were conscious of this at the time and overall I think we did pretty well, but looking back I wish we’d done a little more. It’s so hard to anticipate every meltdown, have eyes on constantly, deal with it properly when it’s like a bomb just went off, not to mention hauling older sibling to appointment after appointment and struggling to find time to breathe, but there’s another little soul there that is probably terrified and understands even less than you do. Make sure you’re checking in there as well.

Good luck.

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