First time poster. Looking for genuine advice from any parents who have encountered a similar situation please....
As title states, our 6 year old DS's behaviour has effectively changed, overnight in a dramatically shocking way. Background and history - at school he is a bright and happy boy seems to love it and meeting expectations for his age so all good there. BUT his behaviour has been flagged to us by teachers in recent times for distracting people at school and sometimes arguing in the playground (poss emotional dysregulation). We had noticed this a little bit at home - but it was nothing beyond what we believed you would expect of a 6 year old boy. Also background, 8 months ago we welcomed a new sibling into the family, making him a big brother.
Cut to these current Christmas holidays. In the last two weeks DS has become a COMPLETELY different child, behaviour wise and mood wise. He can be totally normal and articulate, engaged and happy one minute, then the next minute with no real trigger to speak of, he flips and has a major mood swing that involves hitting us, screaming in our faces, digging his nails in until we bleed and spitting in our faces, saying he hates us and damaging things in the house purposefully - this is all elevated behaviour, something we have not seen from him on this scale ever before. These situations last anything from 5 minutes up to 90 minutes and it can take ages for him to calm down. To give some examples in just the last week alone : Daddy was tidying up the kitchen and put Christmas present money in an envelope that was his, so it didn't get lost....he hated the fact his money was touched and threw keys at Dad's head. Yesterday, he lost the soap in the bath and got so angry about it that he poured water out of the bath, threw it up the walls and flooded the place until everything was dripping, it was unreal. Tonight I don't know what the trigger was at all, but he was furious after dinner and basically hit me at bath time, purposefully wee'd on the floor instead of the toilet, screamed and spat in my face then proceeded to trash his bedroom - took about 1 hour to calm down. After all these instances, he will eventually calm down and say with remorse 'I'm really sorry Mummy that I hit you...and I threw X at you' etc so he seems to sit with it for a while, then apologise. After he's calm, he riverts bac to his normal happy self and you would never now anything bad has happened. Best way I can describe it is...a real Jeyll and Hyde moment.
What am I asking for? I am wondering if you have encountered similar behaviour, which feels like it has come out of the blue. I can't stress the out of the blue bit enough. He's SO incredibly hard to manage right now and I'm really worried about returning to school as he has become so different in these holidays. I keep racking my brains as to what this SUDDEN CHANGE could be... could it new sibling related? could it be ODD? We are currently in the early stages of investigating with a doctor to see if he has ADHD due to school concerns, but his behaviour has changed so dramatically since we saw the doctor about poss ADHD (only 5 weeks ago) this new behaviour feels like more of an immediate issue. He is being violent towards us but not his baby sibling at this point. He is not self harming but keeps saying we don't like him, which is new. We are a really loving family so this language is also a shock and makes me really sad. We've tried punishment, ie. 'don't throw that please else I wont take you X' and followed that through which cues more anger. We've warned and said we will have to remove favourite toy and done that....we've also shouted. We've also tried the calm approach, none of these work. He is the only one who can calm himself down when he is ready. We really need to get his behaviour under control immediately and get to the route of the issue. Is this behaviour familiar to anyone?
Would appreciate any helpful thoughts...... Thank you!