I know it sounds pathetic but it's how I feel. She well and truly wears the trousers and I'm struggling to keep control. She's fiery, short tempered, intelligent and manipulating. She's also wonderful and kind, but, and maybe this is because we've spent alot of the summer holidays together, I have really come to dislike her. I feel awful saying this but she is so infuriating it takes all my self restraint not to back hand her, or to pull her hair when she refuses to walk with me.
She does things knowing there's nothing I can do about it. For example, she falls asleep in my bed, is put to her bed once she's asleep, and quite often comes back in during the night. Her and her younger brother share a room and she knows damn well if she shouts and wakes her brother up she'll get to stay in my room, pushing me off to the sofa. She doesn't listen, at all, not to the smallest request to a serious telling off. We're at a constant stalemate.
I don't want to constantly be shouting or reprimanding her but if I'm honest, our bond isn't great. I struggled with PND right from the start, and it's never really recovered. What makes it worse is a MIL, although well meaning, tries to give me tips (she's a social support worker and works with struggling families) and it just makes me feel even worse about the situation. For whatever reason she sticks to me like glue, wherever i go she has to be there, yet she's constantly nasty. She dislikes her dad, and I'm really not sure why, but her grasp on me is suffocating. I can't sit down without her on my lap, and her face in mine. She screams constantly, winding her younger brother up, is nasty to him, hits bites pulls hair...
Help me! Before I have a mental breakdown!
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Behaviour/development
I'm being bullied by my 5 year old
DaniSecker · 26/08/2016 13:19
I would first sit down and think about which behaviours are actual misdemeanours (and so to be dealt with by discipline) and which are neutral from a behavioural pov.
I notice that the first instance of unreasonable behaviour you list is coming into your room at night. While I do realise that you may not actually want this, it hardly seems like naughtiness if a nervous or insecure child seeks comfort from the person who is there to provide that.
I was terrified of the dark until a much older age than your dd, and though I stopped coming into my parents' room about your dd's age, it was a kind of security blanket for many years afterwards to know that they were there and that if I really could not bear it, they would not reject me. That actually helped me to stay a little bit braver than I might otherwise have done. Dh reports a similar experience, and we have never treated this as naughtiness in our own dc.
It may be that you have to stop it because it disrupts your own sleep (I found I got a better quality of sleep once I stopped fighting it), but if so, I think you should try to treat it as something difficult you are helping your dd with, rather than her being naughty on the same lines as if she snatched the baby's toys or spat in your salad.
The other features you mention- the fighting, the constant clinginess etc- sound a bit like my dd at that age. She was basically a very anxious little girl and eventually grew up to be diagnosed with an anxiety disorder. But that did not mean that I wasn't able to do things to help both of us until she was old enough to be diagnosed/treated. There were plenty of things that helped. Including:
*making sure that we had some leisure time apart every week- and that some of that time was spent allowing me to recharge my batteries
*being calm and matter-of-fact about not always being the one to stay with her: when it was her dad's turn he took over and I walked off, even if she tried to cling screaming to my leg
*trying not to make too many requests that depended on her obeying what I said: if she didn't come with me the second time, I would take her by the hand and walk off, trying to think of something distracting to talk about ; if she took an object she wasn't allowed to, I would ask her once to let it go- then I took it
*distracting myself by singing, or putting on the radio, or boiling the kettle, when I was getting to boiling point myself
*ignoring her reactions to a telling-off as long as I got my way: so if she refused to listen to me about how to treat an object and I took it off her, I counted that as a win to me; if she did what I said with a cat-bum face, that counted as a win to me; if she was carried kicking and screaming out of a playdate, that was still a win to me. I saved myself a lot of frustration that way and eventually she learnt that there isn't much point in fussing because mummy usually gets her way
*building fun moments into the day- didn't have to be anything very wonderful, just making jokes that I knew she would laugh at, or reading a story together- but making sure we had fun together every day
*never letting the sun go down on my wrath- however bad the day had been, she knew it would all be forgotten by bedtime, or at the very least the next morning
Dd has been through some horrible times with her anxiety, and at one time I thought we were going to lose her. 
But she has grown into a wonderfully strong young woman- and we have had some good times together. Hang in there, OP; it will all be worthwhile.
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