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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]You people are fools and let these doctors tell you anything...[/quote]

I have always wondered about this "condition."  One of the factors related to cause is environment.  I bet this is often "overlooked" by many parents.

[quote]Environmental: Factors such as a dysfunctional family life, a family history of mental illnesses and/or substance abuse, and[b] inconsistent discipline[/b] by parents may contribute to the development of behavior disorders.[/quote][/quote]

Poor parenting has always been blamed for many brain based illnesses when in is very likely that parents fall into inconsistent discipline and dysfunctional family life because their child is very difficult to manage.

You could pick the difficult child up and plop him into a family with so called excellent parenting skills, and suddenly those parents would be exhausted and show signs of dysfunctional parenting, in fact.

Now personally I'm a follower of the Collaborative Problem Solving Approach -- kids with challenging behavior will do well when they CAN do well, not when they are MOTIVATED to do well.   Kids with challenging behavior have lagging skills in things like flexibility, ability to anticipate consequences, emotional self regulation etc.  I think if you apply the principals of CPS with these challenging kids you can help them develop and improve them, and avoid a diagnosis of ODD in many cases.[/quote]

Baloney.  ODD definitely is NOT a "brain based illness" (whatever that idiocy means) because it is not biologic in nature.  Where did you come up with that hooey?  And if the parenting is so bad such that the child is diagnosed with ODD, how do you suppose that suddenly they will be good enough to master your espoused approach?  It doesn't work that way.  The child made his or her way into an ODD diagnosis because of environmental factors such as poor parenting.  ODD is not a biologic condition, it is behavioral, and behavior is shaped by parents.[/quote]

The professional consensus is that ODD describes a constellation of behaviors caused by an underlying condition. ODD doesn't exist in a vacuum.[/quote]

I've seen this play out in my own family.  My parents were not good parents, but only 1 child (my stepbrother) got tagged with the ODD label.  (Dx was ADHD but I have no doubt they would have gotten an ODD diagnosis had it been more popular then, in the 90s).  This child was definitely "different" from the other kids in that he was more aggressive, more outgoing, more kinetic, more anxious, and was CONSTANTLY provoking his sister.  Instead of parenting him appropriately and getting him therapy, my parents decided that he was mentally ill and made him take meds and talked about what a bad kid he was.  Turns out, he was actually a highly intelligent person who is now doing very, very well in life (outside of our parents' toxic influence.) So, combination of legitimately difficult kid, with legitimately bad parenting = ODD in this case.

It's possible that ODD exists as a freestanding condition apart from family dysfunction and parenting.  But considering that parenting and behavior interact so closely (and many parents, like mine, chose to displace all their family anxiety on a scapegoat) I am always going to look to the parents first when they claim a child has ODD.  [/quote]

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