'ODD'or just naughty kids with ineffective parenting?

[Rosebud123]

ODD - please! I have a friend whose child has just been 'diagnosed' with ODD.Having known her since a toddler, I have witnessed lack of structure and inconsistency since then. Her behaviour has escalated,understandably. Children need to know what is ok and what is not ok. Did you know that ODD children are now being medicalised?We are rearing a generation of children on ritalin and antidepressants which I find completely shocking.Children need our repect and proper parenting so they don't end up thinking the answer to all life's difficulties lies in pills.A friend who is a social worker says ODD is what children are called when they are told to go to bed and they refuse. Exactly!I found that going to ongoing parenting classes has helped in all aspects of my kids development when I didn't know what else to do. I wonder what Supernanny thinks of 'ODD'..

bythesea my two children are like chalk and cheese. One reserved and quiet, one a typical boy! I had to use different parenting with my DS whereas my DH more or less parented herself.

If you have one child who's well behaved doesn't necessarily mean you been successful, just that they didn't challenge you. The arguement that one of my kids is behaved so it must be them not me, doesn't really cover it.

Whether ODD exists or not, don't think medication is the right answer. It's just easier for the medical profession to hand out pills than supply a Suppernanny.

Funnily I don't know that many children with ASD who are on medication. DS2 has ASD and sometimes chronic OCD but has never taken any medication. I have tried to use diet, behavioural techniques etc ( although of course that doesn't always work)

I suspect that a section of the medicated children are the ones trying to exist within mainstream with little support. Of course that is just a guess.

2oldforthislark This is what I mean -- in your eye it is down to my ineffective parenting as if I haven't tried every bloody method in every parenting book and used different parenting techniques. We use therapeutic parenting BTW but it is a long hard road. Several of these comments are hurtful to parents like me who have put in the effort and I guess only other parents who have children with BESD SN can understand what it's like as lots of the rest of the world sit in judgement.

And yes, my DS is on medication. It takes the edge of his aggression. It just wasn't fair to to my other children, me or my DH anymore to be on the receiving end of it.

takes the edge off

Actually, my opinion is not that parents are 'to blame( we can't really judge until we have walked in someone else's shoes etc.) but that children seem to be medicalised so quickly and who knows the long term effects of this. Are we at 1984 now?

Me too, lequeen - I was residential support in a home for young women with behavioural problems before I met my husband.

me.

on my own.

with my boss on the end of the phone of course.

I had to deal with - well, can't give specifics of course, but you'll know the sort of thing!

I certainly know the difference between stroppy, attention seeking and genuinely troubled!

I wouldn't presume to try to point to parents and say you're a bad one, you've got a child with odd, you need to toughen up.. but anyone who's worked with such kids (in my case worked with them AND had them myself ) you can tell the difference, over time. Not passing them in the street but over time knowing them.

Another ignorant thread. Just what parents need to read when they are struggling with their child with SN and the judgements of people around them.

People seem to be onjecting to calling a set of behaviours a 'disorder'. I can understand that. I have worked with children who had oppositional/defiant behaviour, or ADHD type behaviour, in a school or home setting, but when with me were good as gold. I'm not saying I'm special but I was able to put effective boundaries in in a way that their parents weren't, or didn't.

Lots and lots of these parents wanted their children diagnosed with something, to excuse or explain their behaviour, when it was almost always due to a combination or poor parenting, poor attachment, poor diet (yes really), learning difficulties (frustration expressed as aggressive behaviour at school) etc.

That does not mean the children did not have a behaviour related disorder. Sometimes behaviours become so entrenched in a child that it does become a disorder. It doesn't 'exonerate' the parents of their responsibility but it isn't also something that can be dealt with by a no nonsense, zero tolerance approach to parenting - not after a certain point in their lives. Foster carers have tried that and been unsuccessful.

cory and smallwhitecat:

it genuinely saddens me that i feel like i have to write a disclaimer on the end of every bloody post
disclaimer: I AM NOT GENERALISING, THERE ARE PEOPLE OUT THERE WITH REAL DISORDERS. there are ALSO people out there who are overdramatic pampered to little wusses.

do i need to say it again? i think in my post i was illustrating that there are people who need help, and some people who are pandered to. i was using EXAMPLES, not saying every kid is like that. of COURSE i dont mean that teenagers cant be depressed, god, have some sense, dont jump down my throat, i think it was pretty bloody obvious in what i was saying.

I don't know where these psychiatrists are who hand out drugs to kids willy-nilly .

I fought and argued for a meds trial for my ds for five years, repeatedly being fobbed off with 'he'll grow out of it', 'wait and see' etc.

Well I did wait and see, watched while he became more and more aggressive because of lack of support in school (two schools, actually), and the psychiatrists insisted he didn't need any medication - not that they'd ever seen him in action of course, and what did I know, I was just his mother.

In the end the NHS closed ds's case without telling us and we had to go private to get him the medication he's been needing for years - and what a huge difference it's made for him. At last, after all these years, he's calm enough to absorb what I've been trying in vain to teach him and now he can learn how to behave appropriately.

Some children NEED medication for their genuine behavioural problems that arise from genuine disorders. It pisses me off no end when people with regular kids are so insistent that it's all down to bad parenting. It's not.

okay, calmed down a bit.
the whole POINT i was trying to make was that there are people who need real help out there.
i wasnt generalising, i was using an example.
my parents split when i was 14, and it was horrible, i dealt with it better than others, because i was lucky, of course im not going to make ridiculous claims like its not a traumatic event.

do you understand me now?

Britfuish - I think, in that case, maybe your example was not a great one. I would have sympathy for a teenager who was going through two emotional upheavals and be unsurprised if he/she felt depressed.

Rosebud123 Wed 03-Mar-10 18:01:46
"Actually, my opinion is not that parents are 'to blame( we can't really judge until we have walked in someone else's shoes etc.) but that children seem to be medicalised so quickly and who knows the long term effects of this."

Do you have actual evidence? Because the impression I get both from the SN forum and from RL friends with SN in the family is that it is usually a very hard slog to get a diagnosis, let alone any support or medication. My friends had to fight for years to get diagnosis. Before that, of course, the school tried to handle their dd's odd behaviour by punishing her.

do people really think that it is that easy to get a dx??????
if you do you are barking

Cory, it is really hard in some cases to get a DX for a behavioural SN. I know lots of people who are still waiting after two years+ to get some idea of why their DC act the way they do. I was one of the "lucky" ones who got a dx within 4 months of seeing the paed.

grumpypants, so do i, as this exact example happened to my best friend when we were 16, my own parents having split the year before.

i think im trying to say that there is a big difference between feeling depressed, and having depression.

i feel like i do have to write a disclaimer, flippin' internet, makes everyone take everything so literally.

Five years for us to get a dx. Five years in which the best advice we were given by a medical professional was "Put him on the naughty step", because we were obviously too thick to have thought of that one ourselves . Five years spent begging for help and getting nothing.

It took us a VERY short time to get a diagnosis for our two. Very short indeed. And they had formal diagnosis by aged 2.5 (ds1) and 3 (ds2)

The reason for this, I am firmly convinced - as well as ds1 being very weird indeed was that me and my husband were 'in the field' - he used to work in mh, then social services, then adults with ld. I worked with people with ld and women with behavioural problems...we knew the jargon, knew the dance, they didn't dismiss us as hysterical parents like I have seen happen so many times. They saw us as 'one of them'.

I may be being cynical, but I am convinced they took us more seriously because of it.

I do wonder sometimes...I have a friend whose teenage daughter has "school phobia", won't leave the house, spends hours in her bedroom on MSN till all hours (I wonder how much time she would spend therei f she had no computer, but that's a whole different thread). And yet, alhtough she will not leave the house to go to school or meet her friends, she is able to go into London, on her own, meet a photographer and pose around all afternoon for the photographer then got to a coffee shop with him and chat about her future modelling career.
Yet she apparently is so sensitive she cannot go to school as she has a fear of leaving home.

I do think her problem is more in the region of "I'd rather do things I like".

There are children with genuine problems, and some who are taking the piss.

at what age can they diagnose odd-presumably at least schoool age cos just looking at the list and picking 4 behaviours which need to be present over 6 months

often loses temper
often argues with adults
often actively defies or refuses to comply with adults' requests or rules
often blames others for his or her mistakes or misbehavior

This seems normal toddler behaviour to me