Reply to Desperate plea for help with my 4 year old DD

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Reply to "Desperate plea for help with my 4 year old DD"

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[quote=Anonymous]Hi OP, I agree with others that you should post specific questions in Special Needs. I think people in GP mean well, but I can tell from your tone that you are desperate and have probably been thinking about this for a long time. In my experience, most parents just cannot relate to how heart-breakingly difficult ithis stuff can be.

My son is older and has some of same issues. I have tried OT and all the alternative approaches and they have not helped much. He has recently received diagnoses of generalized anxiety and ADHD. Please know that I am not trying to diagnose your child, just urging you to search for explanations and talk to the real experts (psychologists, developmental peds, etc) to try to understand your child. For me, this is the greatest benefit of the family/play therapy: having an expert help me understand what my child is going through and what can help him. A good therapist can change your life.

For what it is worth, I never in a million years would have thought my son would receive these diagnoses, especially the ADHD, but I'll tell you some of the things that remind me of your daughter. (And again, not trying to give her a specific label, just saying that I truly feel for her because it sounds to me like she is really struggling to cope with life--and this is so hard for a parent to watch!) My son was an angel infant, charmingly precocious as a toddler, sweet-natured, social, and well-regulated. We certainly saw signs of stubbornness and intensity around 2-3 but nothing that was developmentally inappropriate. Around 3.5-4, as he started to become more aware of the world, we saw a huge increase in anxiety, manifesting itself in refusal to participate in activities, difficulty with transitions, some social avoidance, and general irritability. I won't go into too many more details about my kid but just to add one: I think the ADHD makes it very hard to process social situations, or a game, or a classroom, all at once and in real time and so life feels very overwhelming for him. This feeds into the anxiety and produces a lot of unhappiness. A lot of times kids who have a strong need to control are showing that they in fact feel very out of control. Before my son had experienced these things, and before he was developmentally aware, none of it bothered him and we got more of the "real" happy kid.[/quote]

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