4 year olds refusal to walk dictating weekends!

[Hannahlouise4026]

My dd is 5 in November.
Every weekend for the last few weeks/months have resulted in either me or my husband having to abandon whatever plan we had as a family to go home with her as she just lies down in the middle of the steeet and refuses to walk. She says her legs hurt (I know this to be a lie to get out of what she wants to do as she runs off with her friends, swims and dances ( all things she enjoys)
We also have a baby and a almost 6 year old ad well.
Examples -
• last weekend on the Sunday we decided to go to a local national trust castle with fantastic play park, and the promise of lunch. She refused to get out of the car, then rolled around in the ground. In the end my husband sat in the car with her while I took my eldest and baby to the park

•weekend before, we decided to walk to a local cafe with a little play area and get an ice lolly. A 10/15 min walk. We gave her option of using scooter if She wanted. As soon as we got to the end of our street she sat down and refused to move, begging husband to carry her.

•on Thursday we went swimming just myself and baby brother, pool is 2 minutes walk from our front door (literally can see our door from it!) and on the way back she lay on the ground and refused to walk, half an hour later, me standing beside her the whole time, she saw her friend and then ran off with her.

•today she was playing outside with her friends and as it’s a lovely day, we thought we’d take a walk to local park (10/15 min walk) got yo the end of our street and again the same thing happened. I ended up literally having to drag her back while pushing the pram. She’s now rolling around the floor, which will last for ages.

I’ve said she has to spend the next two days indoor, and no iPad/tv time. I’m not sure what other reasonable thing to suggest to stop this happening.

It’s ruining any family thing we do, my husband has one day off a week and we fee we can’t do anything as her refusal to walk/go anywhere ruins it for all of us.

She is smart, friendly, generally well behaved at other times, no developmental/behavioural concerns otherwise.

Please help as we are at the end of our tether.

And yes stop negotiating. My kids get 2 choices! I dictate those choices.

I always complained my legs hurt when I was 4.

I was diagnosed with inflammatory arthritis at 6.

It’s a very simple solution and one I’ve used previously.
It’s shit at first but once she knows you will not back down she will get the picture.

You firmly tell her she IS walking, and you will wait for her to stop being silly before moving. If she still persists, place her on a naughty spot. Make it clear you will wait until she is ready to walk. This is about control and once she realises you will not be picking her up and she will have to walk, she will. Yes she will act up and cry about it but once she sees your persistence it will get easier each time.

Good luck OP

I agree with pp saying getting her checked out. If it turns out to be something, you are in a position to help her, if it’s nothing you can move on to other ways of dealing with it.

My ds(13) complains about his leg if we walk too far. you would think he was just a lazy teenager, turns out he has significantly lower muscle tone in one leg compared to the other, but you,d never know just to look at him.

It is hard to know what is going on. If it is emotional and a way of getting attention, creating a sticker chart with various goals may help. Some easier than others and include one daily goal of walking nicely to school for example.

Get her checked out by the doctor.

Then if no physical issues, what Timandra said.

My friend’s 10 year old still does this! She demands that Daddy carries her everywhere. My friend had confided in me about it ruining holidays etc but I didn’t realise the extent until we all went out for dinner and then she announced “Mummy, I’m too tired to walk to the car, you’ll have to carry me.” She insisted she absolutely couldn’t walk and my friend (who is only 5”2!) had to lift her and carry her with the child holding on to her neck with her arms and her legs round her mum’s waist.

This is a healthy child that gets up at 6am to train in a sport!

She is extremely young seeming for her age and is the baby of the family. She wears clothes that much younger girls would wear, plays with younger toys, wants to go to events and play areas for much younger children, doesn’t perform well at school despite being bright and advanced in the way she communicates - it’s suspected she deliberately holds herself back. She’s been assessed and is neurotypical with a higher than average IQ.

It seems to be her way of avoiding growing up and maybe responsibility. It’s like she wants to stay little and never grow up. I think she’s scared of being given chores and being expected to do things independently.

I’d agree with others that in your daughter’s case it could be due to becoming the older child in the family. It’s not unusual for older siblings to regress a bit and become needier.

My friends son has hyper mobility and one of the symptoms is leg pain when walking

I’m not saying that this is the case but something to think about if it’s not just a tantrum etc

@SofiaAmes Do yo mind me asking what diagnosis your ds received? It’s just that your list of symptoms sounds very much like my ds - and seeing your post reminded me that ds saw a geneticist when he was about 6 who said they would recall him in 5 yrs, that they saw something but weren’t sure if it was symptoms he would grow out of of get worse but they didn’t think it was too bad then but had potential to develop, hence the recall.

This has not only reminded me that we never did have a recall (so I must chase that!) but that over the last 6-12 months he has been complaining about being tired a lot more. He was originally diagnosed as being anaemic due to low iron storage so has been on iron supplement for that and they say he is back to normal levels but he still says he’s tired. And as it’s summer it’s much easier to compare his body to his peers playing in the park or the pool - and he is ridiculously skinny with no real muscle - his age 7 trunks are big on him!

He has also finally been formally diagnosed with dyslexia and dyspraxia so I’ve been concentrating on that and the iron supplement recently, particularly as he is moving up to senior school.

Seeing your list of symptoms is making me think I need to go back to the dr to get him looked at in a more general way again - difficult at my local go surgery as they seem to impose a one appointment one issue rule - so when you have a diverse set of issues they don’t want to know. Whereas this has just made me think that if I could go in and say ‘I’m worried ds has xxxxx because he matches this list of symptoms then it would be one thing to ask them about! If you don’t want to post on here I completely understand - in which case would it be cheeky to ask if you could pm me?

Thank you so much - hope your son is ok and you’re/he is able to manage his symptoms.

Op sorry for the side track!

link has good ideas

I'd check out the legs hurting though to be on the safe side. My DD is hyper mobile and gets dreadful leg and joint pain and a 4 year won't be able to articulate this very well.

I agree with timindra whole heartedly.

The other posts make me shudder.
I do hope you bear in mind it could be physical as pp said. And if it's not its emotional. Another thing we do with ours is pull her along on the scooter.

As an aside I had real issues with dd not being able to stand me chewing. I didn't know what to do. I asked on here and had the..

That's so rude tell her she can't leave the table tough... Naughty madam...

And the.. Maybe she has something which affects her hearing, there's a name for it I can't remember it now, but it was a 'thing' I looked into it and it's very common.
I let her leave the table when she needed too and several years on she's mostly grown out of it. I'm so glad I didn't go with the..

Naughty rude Madam posts, although I wouldn't have anyway because I just don't feel that about small children.

I also dislike the..

She just wants attention things. If child is a doing extreme things to get attention maybe they do need some attention!!

Yes, waking refusal and tantrums like that are normal at 18 mos to 3 but a 4 year old still doing regularly isn’t so much.

I know it's the wrong thing to do, but I'd be tempted to mirror her. When you are going somewhere she wants to go, stop suddenly and say your legs hurt. Make her wait 15 mins and even turnaround because your legs hurt so much. Same when you are making her something nice to eat, or getting her a drink. Stop before you finish and sit down and relax 'because your legs hurt'😅

@wibbletooth ds was diagnosed with Mitochondrial Disease. It's a catch all terminology to describe any disease with mitochondrial disfunction at its roots. My ds has Calcium channel mutations. Functionally his mitochondria are not working well and don't produce enough energy to run his body. This means that anytime there is a call for extra energy, things go wrong in his body. He's 18 now and a little more stable, but ages 10-17 (ie puberty) were really really bad. If he caught a cold he could be out of commission for weeks (in bed completely exhausted) and would get side effects like cyclical vomiting and migraines. He also developed bipolar which he was apparently at high risk for (geneticist told me after symptoms appeared...wish I'd known before). When ds was first diagnosed, genetic testing was $30,000 (luckily we were part of a clinical trial and didn't pay anything). Now full genome testing costs $1500 and takes an hour. Although it is important to get a doctor who knows what they are doing to analyze the results. Ds' doctor here in the USA is very good. His name is Dr. Richard Boles and his website is here. Also there are a couple of websites that describe symptoms and treatments for mitochondrial disease: mitoaction and umdf.

There are doctors in the UK who specialize in mitochondrial disease. Remember that it's a very wide spectrum of severity, and in the old days, only the very severe patients who often didn't make it out of childhood were diagnosed. Now far more children are getting diagnosed (and treated).

Ds has dyspraxia and eyesight issues related to the poor muscle tendon development. It's very common in mito kids.
The good news is that the treatment was quite successful and involved large doses of supplements (lots of different ones) with very few adverse side effects.

Ds is doing much better medically now that he is older, but has other issues (related to the bipolar) that we are still dealing with. However since he's 18 and male...he's not listening much to me these days.
Please feel free to dm me if you want more individual information.

I am surprised by how many posters completely discount the possibility that the OP's dd may actually be in pain. What does a 4 year old have to do besides say they are in pain, to actually get an adult to believe it?

Thinking about it, DS is 13 and a county standard runner. He is slightly hyper mobile though. All his life he has had gripes about sore knees and achy flat feet. When he was little he really didn’t like walking at all. Even now he can’t pound the pavements for a day if we are doing a sightseeing city break.

@SofiaAmes op says dd runs off with her friends with no complaints. That's why hardly anyone is questioning it.

Walk away. She’ll catch you up. I’d strongly resist a buggy or buggy board as a school aged child should be perfectly capable of walking a few miles. If she sees friends playing after she’s throw not a paddy, instead of letting her run off, make her sit and watch because she’s too tired.

@timandra nails it. There is a reason why she is doing this and you need to try and understand why. It could be genuinue tiredness/ pain or behavioural. Trying to understand what the child is communicating before punishing or threatening with abandoning as some have suggested.

Def GP/ physio referral to check everything ok physically.

I'd try a buggy board as a practical solution. If that doesn't work then I'd be looking at what triggers her not wanting walk and maybe doing a diary to see a pattern.

Yes but like anyone else in pain you can take your mind off it and even if it's not physical pain maybe it's emotional...

I've seen my dd unwell, in push chair then sees something runs about back in push chair unwell.

As above: possibly a gp’s appointment to rule out any physical cause, then if that’s all clear I might possibly go with the buggy / buggy board. Take all the emotion out of it, and praise the child walking nicely (and your dd on the occasions she does). However, I say that as a parent of older children, with the benefit of hindsight, that all these things that seem such big deals when you’re living them, they do resolve with time. But I do think my feeling would be not to let the behaviour of the minority ruin days out for the majority.

When 4 year old did this I took the buggy. I then gave the choice, walk or buggy. When he refused both I strapped him in the buggy and went on our way while he balled and yelled and sobbed in temper. I ignored him and also any looks I got. Mind you looks were generally of sympathy. Eventually temper settled and he asked to get out and walk.
It only happened a few times till the penny dropped that I meant business.

I do understand this isn't possible if you are already pushing a buggy :(

When I was a kid, up till I'd guess late years of junior school, my hips would hurt after more than a couple of minutes continuous walking. Running around playing was okay, maybe because it's intermittent and a different kind of movement, as was swimming. It was just something about walking, and yes, it really did hurt, and no, nobody believed me.