4.6yr old DD - behaviour not great, running out of ideas.

[caspercat]

Hi all. Not been on here for ages, but feel is the best place to come for help.
Our DD is 5 in July. Although she's always been quite headstrong, she's generally happy, funny, lovely to her little brother and loving to me & DH.
I don't really know how to explain her behaviour - she seems to just like 'playing up'. She ignores any questions we ask her (even just general things like 'did you sleep well?'), hardly ever does as we asks, has a meltdown if things don't go her way, refuses to use her fork & spoon when eating. They all sound like little things, but when it all seems to happen in the hour between getting up & leaving for school, the morning just descends into frayed tempers & me and her getting really upset. I get so angry with her I have to just leave her in her room while I go somewhere to calm down.
We are doing a reward chart with her, expecting her to get at least 3 stars out of her 4 (with 3 things on there she does well regularly, leaving her with the 1 behaviour we want to improve), and she gets a reward at the end of the day when she gets at least 3 stars. But I think this is causing a lot of the problems, because her reward is usually playing a game or doing craft stuff (her favourite thing) with me - which means she goes to bed a little later than usual for me to fit this time in with her. I think then she is tired the next day, which really affects her mood. I don't want to reward her with sweet things/food etc, and I can't buy her a comic at the end of each day. We tried doing the Supernanny type reward chart (where she tries to get her princess to the top of her chart - but she was losing interest because the reward wasn't instant!)
I try my my best to do the ignore bad behaviour / reward good, and she's good as gold at school.
I'm really sorry for the long post. I just feel like i'm failing her at the moment, because every day seems to involve some kind of shouting match or her (and me) being upset, and I feel like her life is a bit miserable at the moment.
Any advice, please??

What food does she eat, sleep does she get, and exercise?

assuming that her hearing is ok and that all other developmental checks are ok,maybe youy can frame how you approach her?

dd1 was ok at hearing,but i took her to the docs because she often behaved like you described and she seemed not to follow normal verbal clues unless she was already focused. Never did get any help andshes grown up now.
In retrospect she was the kind of kid who needed a different approach. eg I should have talked less at her and let her shadow me more at her level, may be doing things on the floorand letting her lead the talk with gentle encouragement and verbal clues only . When shes bored let her move on. Your dd is also an older child so maybe the acting out is something to do with it,?

Mine sounds very similar - she's now 5.5. I would say there's been some improvement over the last few months, since she started school.

She won't get herself dressed in the morning, brush her hair or do her teeth - although she's quite capable of it. She quite often refuses to use her cutlery. Can answer back or just seems to be a dream world.

I am finding explaining consequences of her actions quite helpful but it does get into a bit of a bargaining debate. Reward charts for pocket money seem to help - she gets £1 on Saturday to buy something in the Pound shop if she's got enough ticks.

I'm putting it down to starting school, being tired and it all being quite stressful for her. I think maybe we just have to keep going with the positive reinforcement.

Her hearing was an issue - turned out she had quite bad glue ear & only 10 days ago she had an op to place grommets in both ears. So hearing is now pretty much 100%, and that is obvious in that I now don't have to repeat myself quite as often!
She's always been a good sleeper - goes down at roughly 7.30, sleep till 7am next day no prob. She eats pretty well too, there's a few things she doesn't like, like most kids i suspect, but she eats pretty much anything i give her. As for exercise - not too much after school as pretty shattered, also there's not much time. But she has ballet class on a Monday eve, swimming on a Sat morning (tho that's on hold at the mo because of her ear op). If the weather's not too bad on the weekends, we take her scooter to the park or we go to the woods, and there's nearly always some kind of indoor softplay type place we go to as well.
On a Thursday her little brother is at nursery all day so I make sure when I collect her from school that we have some quality time just the 2 of us.
We've tried 'time-out'. It's pretty pointless taking toys away or stopping tv, cos her brother still likes to chill in front of the telly after bath time, and she likes playing with his toys too!
I realise I have to re-evaluate how I parent her. I've done all the lists for myself re all the lovely things she does. I really do think I'm quite good at praising all her good points and trying to ignore the not-so-good stuff.
It's just so hard trying to do the right thing all the time, and i'm obviously not doing something quite right enough....

Both my dd's have had grommets and I've found it takes a while to adjust to being able to hear again. Esp DD1 who was almost deaf in both ears and then could suddenly hear things she'd never heard before. TBH can understand her behaviour being a bit challenging for a few weeks after op and it's only been 10 days. I know it's hard, but cut her some slack she's still recovering from an operation.

For rewards I keep a little bag with thins in that my DC will like and when they get enough stickers I give one to them so they get something immediately.

My reward chart works differently to yours. My dcs get stickers for various things (tidying up, doing homework etc) and each time they do it they put the sticker in a square. When they fill all the squares they get the reward. That way they are under no pressure to do a certain amount each day but love getting the stickers anyway, it has really worked.

That's things not thins