to feel this sense of sadness towards my child?

[Rockingrobin69]

i have a 4 yo ds who is very high spirited, on the manic side and generally quite hard work. im a single parent with a useless ex H who on the rare occasions he sees DS shouts at him, and ds calls me asking for me to come and pick him up. he sporadically financially supports his son, leaving me working all hours running a business, with very little childcare support. i go to the gym to increase my energy levels with DS when he is at school 3 days a week but generally feel very stressed most of the time and seem to spend a lot of time tellling off ds for his behaviour, for eg kicking things, breaking things by being unable to stand still,

all i want is to be able to cuddle ds on the sofa and chat and connect with him. he has to be asked to do the simpliest things three or four times, and everything is difficult for him. i take him out one to one all the time, i spend a lot of time playing with him, taking him to activites and holidays, and my reward from him is him shouting at me and i find his inability to be able to stay still for any length of time really irritating and in turn feel really guilty for feeling like this.

i hate feeling resentful of him, and i hate myself for not enjoying his childhood as i should be :(

Are there any activities he can do and concentrate on?
How often does he do them?

I did a course (free through school) for my DD called positive parenting

I found it very useful...the aim is to give you the 'tools' to deal with the behaviour so not everything would work with you or your child but there is usually something that chimes with you

For example I can't stand those bloody reward charts, don't use them

Dd has pretty much grown out of the worst behaviour but I think being given ideas on how I could deal with it and not kill her was very helpful

antimatter why did you revive an old thread, it's really not very nice for an OP to have this done out of the blue.

sorry & my apologies - I didn't notice this was an old thread, I was searching for something else and it popped up in my search and I commented on it

old threads have notice on them and I would never commented on one

OP that sounds hard. Especially when it's relentless and not just 'a bad day' here and there. The course that rufus went on sounds good.

Oh shit!!!!

I've never posted on an old thread before

Dammit...unbroken record now broken

oooh what that's annoying.

I do it all the time

I feel embarrassed too, this is my first ever!