L
LostSF
Guest
I'm wondering if anyone has advice for a family that is about to go from bad to much, much worse?
If you could go back in time and give your former self advice before things with your difficult child really got difficult, what would you say?
My SD (14) has had behavioural issues all her life, but now that she's in her teens things have taken a real turn for the worse. Until about a year ago, her issues were tolerable -- a lot of attitude, a lot of lying (about relatively unimportant things), being manipulative, etc.
But in the last year, and especially in the last few months, things have gone downhill. She's constantly finding ways to break the rules and finding ways around the consequences we give her, and the seriousness of the rules she's breaking is steadily increasing. It's gotten to the point where we don't trust her to be at home alone, and we don't trust her when she's out with her friends.
We have her in therapy, but it's not helping.
In a few weeks school will be over, and she'll be home alone for most of the day while her mother and I work. We've thought seriously about putting her into some kind of daycare or trying to get relatives to watch her during the day, but she's made it very clear that if we go that route she will do everything she can to ruin it so we'll have no choice but to let her stay home. She's done that very thing in the past, so I have no doubt that she'll do it again.
I feel like I'm sitting in a house where a fuse has been lit, and in a few weeks the bomb is going to go off. I can't imagine what things are going to be like in our house in a couple of years, but I'm dreading what the future looks like more than I can say.
So if you could go back and give yourself some advice, what would it be? What worked well, or what would you have done differently?
If you could go back in time and give your former self advice before things with your difficult child really got difficult, what would you say?
My SD (14) has had behavioural issues all her life, but now that she's in her teens things have taken a real turn for the worse. Until about a year ago, her issues were tolerable -- a lot of attitude, a lot of lying (about relatively unimportant things), being manipulative, etc.
But in the last year, and especially in the last few months, things have gone downhill. She's constantly finding ways to break the rules and finding ways around the consequences we give her, and the seriousness of the rules she's breaking is steadily increasing. It's gotten to the point where we don't trust her to be at home alone, and we don't trust her when she's out with her friends.
We have her in therapy, but it's not helping.
In a few weeks school will be over, and she'll be home alone for most of the day while her mother and I work. We've thought seriously about putting her into some kind of daycare or trying to get relatives to watch her during the day, but she's made it very clear that if we go that route she will do everything she can to ruin it so we'll have no choice but to let her stay home. She's done that very thing in the past, so I have no doubt that she'll do it again.
I feel like I'm sitting in a house where a fuse has been lit, and in a few weeks the bomb is going to go off. I can't imagine what things are going to be like in our house in a couple of years, but I'm dreading what the future looks like more than I can say.
So if you could go back and give yourself some advice, what would it be? What worked well, or what would you have done differently?
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