A lot of people have this outlook. IMO, it’s confusing cause and effect. It may not be that Frylock’s daughter gets upset/angry in order to get attention. It may be that she often tries to be friendly or helpful or contribute in some positive way, and it goes unacknowledged. But! They always notice when she’s doing something they don’t like. And speaking from experience, it is hard not to get angry when that happens. It sends a clear message that she doesn’t matter to her family, except Og help her if she crosses them.
And yes, I know: she never tries to be friendly or helpful or contribute in any positive way. Maybe. Or maybe she does and it just doesn’t register.
This may be a useful story for you: when I was in grad school, I went to a counselor because I didn’t want to end up repeating what I did my senior year of undergrad (getting so mired in depression I almost didn’t graduate.) The counselor told me I seemed very high strung to her. Now I am totally not high strung, right? I am super laid back! I am very chill!
So I asked my friend that evening “Hey, do you think I’m high strung?”
He kind of laughed nervously and started backing up.
I have TMJ and I went to a dentist for a mouth guard. He said, “Yep, this looks like TMJ. Tell me, are you high strung?” He took my hysterical giggle as assent.
Ok, we know that she lies.
She acts helpless.
She likes the drama of being punished.
And she is 8.
A couple suggestions.
For the lying about the rules, which sounds like a strategy for her to get what she wants try this: make a deal with her. From here on out you write it down. If there is any question, check what is written down. What this may do is take the confrontation away from you and puts it on the list of rules. It also makes it all but impossible for her lie to work.
The helplessness may be for attention. Try and focus the attention on the after effects of the action. For example, if she is acting helpless about something, help her do it while explaining how to do it herself in the future. Make an agreement that next time she does it herself and write it down and maybe make a list for her to follow. If she act helpless about the same thing again, pull out the paper and have her try it. If she does it (with minimal acting out) lavish praise on her.
If she likes the drama of being punished then I would guess that the punishment isn’t really hitting her where it hurts. For example, when my grandson was out here his Mom would punish him with a swat on the butt (which I hate). Grandson would cry for about 30 seconds then go on with whatever the hell it was he was doing in the first place. This obviously didn’t work. My Grandson did something wrong one day and I put him in time out. He screamed (literally) for 45 minutes. I kept him there and told him that time out meant 3 minutes of quite time and when he could do that he could get up. The second time I put him in timeout it was 30 minutes. Amazingly, the third time I threatened timeout, he immediately stopped the bad behavior. Spankings didn’t phase him (and I don’t like them for kids much anyway) but he hated the timeouts. So try to find the punishment that really affects her.
Of course, a good shrink will likely have better suggestions that I do.
Leave out the part about “if your older kid gets annoyed.” Making your undivided attention contingent on him being visibly pissy and jealous of his sister is setting up a whole lot of life lessons you don’t want to teach. I learned most of them as a kid, and I’ll tell you here and now they don’t serve a person well in life and you don’t just magically unlearn them simply because you realize they don’t serve you well.
I grew up in a family with a lot of similarities to the OP’s. My parents were stretched fairly thin just dealing with work and the house and general adult life, and my brother was, to put it as charitably as possible, a constant, unmitigated pain in the ass who turned every. little. thing. into an hours-long struggle. Homework? Three hours of Mom or Dad sitting at the table with him. Cleaning his room? Five hours of Mom or Dad standing in his room supervising. Anything he didn’t like? An hour of bellowing like a bull being surgically castrated with no anesthetic, often emphasized with throwing things, or with histrionic accusations of persecution. He would have been exhausting even if they hadn’t already been spread thin; as it was they often just had nothing left in the tank for me by the time they got through dealing with his bullshit.
They went through a spell of trying to give him extra attention and enrichment activities to build up his confidence and hopefully improve his behavior, which tipped the time/energy/money/attention scales even further toward him. That was…a really bad time in my life. The only way I got any attention was to act out, and it was, predictably, negative attention. I internalized a lot of things that badly damaged my relationship with my brother, and with my parents, and that still sometimes hamper my relationships with other people. Your trouble child needs you, yes, but your other kids need you too.
On the bright side, my brother is a productive member of society. He went through some rocky stuff in his twenties, but he turned things around and has a decent job, a good marriage, and one of the best kids on the planet.
Try finding some cooperative games. Basically there is only one goal, and the participants have to work together to try and make it happen. In the good ones, the solutions will not be immediately apparent, even to the adults who are playing.
These games teach kids how to “stay in the solution” instead of continually focusing on what is wrong, or looking for ways to assess blame. It also helps build a family habit of working together, and a basic expectation that everybody will help. I’d advise both parents and all the kids being involved whenever possible.
Here are some that need little or nothing purchased.
Celtling really likes “Lost Puppies” and “Race to the Treasure”. You can also do craft or engineering projects together cheaply - a bag of mini marshmallows and a box of spaghetti, with a building project like “make a replica of the Eiffel Tower.” and everybody works together to create the final, taking turns adding a piece.
I actually had to take a break from this thread because I was so irritated by the pile-on. In desperation I went and read the old thread everybody was harping about, and frankly, I found it ridiculous. I have tried to do this myself, refusing to entertain a tangent and keep a discussion productive in the area I need help thinking through. Emotions always run high when parenting is discussed, but it’s up to each of us to separate our pet peeves from the discussion at hand.
It felt to me like an exercise in recreational outrage, with several people getting caught up in nitpicking the question instead of formulating helpful answers. Even using the above as examples (which are just examples, and of the more civil ones, I’m sorry to say) it would have been so easy to say “Is this maybe part of what you are modeling for her? Is it possible your exhaustion and frustration are leading you to lead her in a direction you really don’t want to go?”
Piling on like this, and refusing to budge from some tangential detail is seldom productive.
Slight apologies for the res but it’s a relevant update. I was searching for some other old posts of mine and this one came up.
First: I missed the above the first time around TruCelt and my reply is: EXACTLY! Well put.
As to the topic of the OP and the thread: She’s a really cool, creative, hilarious daughter who keeps me honest by arguing against any parental bullshit I may try to pull off from time to time.
She recently told me I should be a counselor, because “You’d be good at it,” based on the kinds of talks she and I have had about the issues I brought up here. I’m saying that only tangentially to toot my horn, but mostly to explain the extent of how much better things are between me and her.
A lot of the advice here went into how things went, so thank you for that.
While we didn’t end up seeking therapy (we discussed it very seriously) we did have her visiting with a social worker at school for a while, which may have helped some.
We still argue a lot to be honest but we trust each other now, as opposed to before. I always make a point to affirm her intentions, and the focus is always on problem solving and character building. (By the latter I mean allowing her to decide who she wants to be, and framing issues at least in part in terms of how they help or hinder that.)
Also, between OP and now, I started taking anti-anxiety medication. I have always had issues with anxiety and depression, but shortly after the OP it started really “flaring up” for lack of better phrasing, and I began yelling at my kids, unfairly, almost daily–or else retreating to be away from everyone, which is also not right.
The anxiety meds seemed really effective w.r.t. that tbh.
Anyway, we’re still stressed, always will be probably, and there are always ongoing issues of course, such is parenting, but the general theme and tone of life with the daughter described in OP is positive and hopeful, on her end as well as mine.
Forgot to update on the school stuff: She completes her homework now, usually before she gets home. The social worker was a big help with that. (She always used to say she had completed it before getting home, but now that’s usually true!) Moreover her teachers, while they really want her to do her work, are also kind of chill about it in the big picture because her standardized test scores are through the roof. So to me, that’s nice actually, for though it may enable some lack of discipline if she and we aren’t careful, it also sensibly removes a needless source of stress.
