Any parents here have children diagnosed with ODD? How did/do you deal?
BPD here, but there are close ties. Many in our group family sessions were diagnosed with ODD as well as BPD. For most in the group, Dialetical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) really was a great help - can’t hurt to look into that.
I wish you the best of luck - it was tough going for us, but as I explained to family and friends being diagnosed with a disorder like this should not be a secret, shameful thing. We would get emotional support if our child had <gd forbid> diabetes or cancer, so it’s a shame that we had/have to hide mental issues, just when we really do need the most support.
I wholeheartedly agree. Our son was just diagnosed and he’s 14. Had there been better public awareness, we might have recognized the signs earlier and gotten help when he was in early elementary instead of middle school like he his now in the throes of puberty.
My niece’s (age 8) doc suggested that she might have this, but I think they’ve backed off on officially giving her the diagnosis. She has no problems in school…a friend of mine who works in a special-needs school commented that several of his students have ODD and if my niece had such a condition, she couldn’t just switch it off for school and switch it off when she comes home.
Anyway, I feel for you Cardigan. It’s hard enough to manage a little girl who shows some occasional signs of ODD. I can’t imagine how exhausting it is to manage a teenage boy who has full-blown ODD. It’s trying and as parents I’m sure you feel very helpless at times.
Our parental challenge now seems to be that our son is using a certain rapper slash self-appointed-self-help-guru called Prince EA to justify his willingness to fail school without making an effort.
Prince Ea’s arguments are based on appeals to emotion, slick video production, specious analogies, and dicey logic and don’t really stand up well to critical thought - a fairly good analysis can be found here:
But the problem is we’re talking about a 13 year old here, and to him and Prince Ea is the embodiment of Coolness and therefore speaks from a position of Authority. I doubt my son is (currently) capable of the sort critical thought needed to counter this with logic. So I need to figure out how to respond in a way he can get his head around.
I wish you luck. My daughter was diagnosed with ODD at 13. I could fill the internet on what didn’t work. In our case, we never found anything that worked. I am ashamed to say that it only got better when she decided to move out of the house, (at legal age). She hasn’t made contact with us since then. Honestly, I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.
I actually find a lot to agree with in the Prince EA video I just watched.
One thing I’d take away from it is that the dropouts who created Apple, Facebook, YouTube, etc. dropped out in order to do MORE work than the school had for them. They didn’t dropout to drink beer and play video games. They dropped out to work 16 hours a day 7 days a week to make their breakthrough vision a reality.
These are people who were already brilliant, successful students. They weren’t failing 8th grade math, they were succeeding at Stanford or Harvard and realized that they couldn’t work 100 hours a week building their brand and do schoolwork at the same time.
Regardless of whether or not the school system is broken, it’s the system we have, if your son doesn’t achieve his potential within that system, he’s going to have a harder time providing for himself when he’s an adult.
You know who also dropped out of college to “build her brand”? Elizabeth Holmes.
This notion of creating a career out of “building a personal brand” before one has actually accomplished anything worth building a brand on sounds like bullshit created by marketers at LinkedIn to me.
I don’t know? Drive to the poorest neighborhood you can find and show him what life looks like for most people who dropped out of school.
I’m confused as to the suggestion that a lack of “better public awareness” is somehow responsible for the situation you find yourself in. Surely you and school personnel observed SOME issues before age 14? What did you do when your kid was an oppositional defiant kindergartner? Middle schooler? Why do you think the receipt of a diagnosis of ODD has some magical affect on modifying his behavior?
I don’t know the OP, and don’t intend to criticize him/her. But in my limited experience, it is somewhat uncommon to encounter the parent of a problem teen who has, in fact, “tried everything.” Far more common are parents who raised the kid however they wanted, and then act all surprised when those parenting choices did not achieve the results they desired.
He was not diagnosed, because his shrink did not want to lay any kind of diagnosis on him, but the shrink suggested we check out ODD. And there was not a lot about it.
But in the course of checking it out and learning about it I realized that I had it/have it. This came about from an internet source that had some suggestions on what to do about it, which I read and immediately said, “I’m not doing THAT.” (For the record, this is a typical ODD response to anything recommended by anyone else; if you thought of it yourself, no problem.) It should be noted that I, who normally have a great memory for words and spellings, could not remember what ODD stood for and had to look it up numerous times.
Because of my own experiences I thought of it as routine kid behavior, and my sons who didn’t have it I assumed got the “perfect child” gene, obviously from my husband’s side and not mine.
The same drugs that help in ADHD can also help, in some cases. But my sons wouldn’t take them. (They did help me. Ritalin was like a magic pill that instantly turned me into a better person.)
DBT also worked, but the kid in question wouldn’t do it until he was ordered to by a court. A couple of nights in juvie convinced him that he wasn’t really that person, and he really didn’t want to spend any more of his life in jail. It’s true that they can’t just switch it off, but they can learn to recognize triggers and learn how their behavior affects others. (So far, so good, with that kid.)
I should note, we saw a lot of improvement after he’d done a 21-day Outward Bound course, too.
An acquaintance also dealing with it with a younger child has had good luck with equine therapy. Yeah, horses. They don’t ride the horses. They somehow develop a relationship with the horse. I’m not sure what they do, but it’s worth checking out.
The main problem with ODD of course is getting the person in question to realize it’s a problem they need to do something about. It pretty much has to be hooked into something the kid already wants to do (horses for the one kid, mountain hiking for mine, maybe sports if the kid is so inclined–although most sports have a lot of authority figures to rebel against).
You seem to be blaming the parents for causing the progression of ODD. But a 5-year-old with ODD is probably just seen as a normal, if disobedient, kindergartner, and they’re small, they can be managed. If it’s your first kid, or all your kids, you think that’s just how kids are and s/he’ll grow out of it. And if you’re a person who has it (and the kid got it from somewhere, it’s baked in there), you’re even slower to recognize it.And then you’ve got a teenager.
Trust me, if I could have been any other way, I would have been. I’m sure my sons feel the same. It wasn’t my mother’s “parenting choices” and it wasn’t my parenting choices either. Allthough we were none of us perfect parents.
Fine. That may be you. I guarantee you, however, that school staff and doctors are familiar with the diagnosis and progression.
I remember when we were having difficulties taking my 2d kid to a child psychologist as a toddler. His response was, “That kid has a negative disposition!” 
A year or 2 later, we enrolled him in pre-K, and in 1st grade, we got the spectrum diagnosis.
I’m not saying there are NO parents who did everything they could, etc. But there also are (IMO&E) at least a fair number of shitty, lazy, ignorant, disengaged parents, and at least a fair number of kids who are poorly behaved and have never had to appreciate the repercussions of their actions.
Okay, one perfect parent.
The hospital where I used to work had an inpatient child psych unit, and we would get kids as young as 5, usually with an ODD diagnosis. These were kids who were already acting out, as in setting fires, harming animals or smaller children, engaging in inappropriate sexual behavior, etc. From what I heard, they were often in foster care and had been all of their lives.
One of the other pharmacists, who raised two normal and very successful children, always chuckled whenever he saw the DX of “behavioral problems” because he said, “Kids are walking behavior problems; what were they expecting?” but he knew that these were kids who were NOT normal.
I am fully aware that my parental shortcomings are legion.
Really, I replaced the word ‘product’ with ‘brand’ because facebook isn’t exactly a product. Point being they didn’t drop out of college because “college sucks” but because they saw a market opportunity for a product or service and couldn’t work crazy hours on their business and do schoolwork at the same time.
So if our 13 year old is replacing school work with Fortnite, he isn’t doing what Prince EA is extolling, he’s just being lazy.
Well there’s cause and effect here. It almost seems like you’re implying that these kids were in foster care because they were so problematic that their parents gave up on them, rather than that their behavior problems were the result of early parently neglect or abuse or abandonment.
For the records, my kids (and I) are not psycho- or sociopathic. We are not bed-wetting pet torturers. Um, there have been some fires. It was more like, “I am not going to do that. I was going to do that, but then you told me to, so now I’m not.” Which can get very wearing on a parent. The thing is, if you don’t do your homework when you’re in elementary school, it’s no problem. No consequences. If you don’t do your homework you can’t watch television? Okay, fine. I hate television anyway. If you don’t do your chores you won’t get your allowance? Okay, fine, it’s not like I’m paying rent, I’ll get stuff I want some other way. These strategies worked on our other kids but they did not work on the ODD kids.
But real consequences sometimes did work. One of my sons was very lackadaisical about school, and he was not going to graduate on time, and he didn’t care. Then Columbine happened, and suddenly, did he really want to spend another year in high school, which had just turned into a place where you might get shot? No. Did he want to get a GED instead? No, it turns out, he didn’t want that, either. So in two months he managed to pull it together enough to graduate with his class. Barely.
This seems akin to blaming the parents of a T1 diabetic for what they had fed them until diagnosis.
Just TRY getting an ODD kid to do therapy. If a parent is able to get a kid to buy into it, then the ODD is not that bad. My kid was in therapy beginning at age 4. Didn’t help at all, simply gave her one more thing to rebel against. ODD is something WAY beyond your scope of knowledge. I’d suggest you not spout off your opinion on a mental condition you know nothing about.
I completely get that better understanding would have resulted in earlier intervention.
My daughter has severe ADHD…like when she was tested the psychologist doing the testing was “wow!” But she wasn’t tested - therefore no interventions were taken - until the end of 9th grade.
Did we notice things were strange with her? Yes, but teacher after teacher told us it was normal, that it was something she’d grow out of. Her pediatrician didn’t see anything wrong either. Her ADHD is inattentive type, not hyperactive type. She wasn’t disruptive (for the most part) and she’s smart - so it wasn’t until high school that inattentive ADHD caught up with her - and her Algebra teacher noticed the difference in her performance if she stood rather than sitting.
That’s ADHD, which teachers face all the time. Not ODD which is rather rare. There is a lot of “they’ll grow out of it” and teachers really don’t want another IEP in their classrooms.
And early intervention can make a difference in both AHDH and ODD. Or maybe not. The thing with ODD is that it is really hard to treat because by its very nature, someone with ODD is non-compliant in their treatment.