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[quote=Anonymous]Glad to see these helpful, informative, and supportive posts for the OP.

This is a hard business, even for those of us in households with two parents pretty much always on-duty.  I can only imagine how tough it must be for a single mom.  Ours started out with terrible sleep issues, and later displayed other challenges.  It was nonstop howling and meltdowns for much of the early part of her life.  I used to make the grim joke I know it's not funny at all, but one sometimes relies on black humor in such circumstances) that if she had been born to a teenage mother, she would have been left in a dumpster before she was two months old.

My two cents:

1) Forgive yourself your inevitable losses of composure, just do your best to learn from them and try to do better going forward.  I had to learn not to raise my voice to our child when she was being impossible; over time I have done it less and less often, I don't kid myself that I will never do it again but it's now many months between instances -- working on lasting over a year!
2) Try not to escalate. The more out of control the child gets, the calmer you should try to project yourself -- if for no other reason than that parental excitement can just rev up a disregulated child even further.
3) I know it's hard, but when a child is acting out it usually means they are struggling in some way and are more in need of help/understanding than at any other time.  My spouse said this a few times to me before I internalized it to the point where I could use that knowledge in the moment.  Before then, was only doing a lot of after-the-fact reconstructions of what had happened and why.
4) Kids aren't machines; if the chemistry is off just a bit they can become terrors.  We have learned the hard way that acting out is usually a side effect of fatigue.  Not sure if that is true for you, but worth finding out if it is.

For what it's worth, ours eventually became a cheerful, hard-working, sunny child.  If you can hang in there and support your child through the roughest spots as best you can, you never know what the future will bring.  I agree with those who have recommended ways for you to get the breaks that you need; you can't adequately support your child if you yourself are falling apart.  [/quote]

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