Hello all. My son is lovely, bright and sociable, but seems unhappy most of the time. Just when I felt I had this parenting thing sorted, it all goes haywire again. He is extremely sociable and obsessed with being with other children/people all the time. I try my best but honestly feel that I must be doing a terrible job. Some specific examples - we moved house and happen to now live two doors away from one of his school friends. Every day, as soon as he comes out of school, he asks whether he can go to their house to play. There are certain days when this isn't possible due to us or them having set plans on these days every week. He knows this. So the answer is always no. He then cries all the way home and has a screaming crying fit for around an hour because he can't do this. I've tried lots of different things to deter this and nothing works. It usually ends with an hour of crying and him refusing to do simple things he does every day (take off shoes and put away/get changed etc) while I try to calmly talk to him which has no effect and eventually end up shouting and being filled with guilt.
He has been like this for his whole life and I used to be permenantly exhausted. I was a single parent and suffered with serious depression since before he was born. I generally feel a lot better these days, though am still prone to feel worried/down/tired/unhappy and I'm worried that this is all my fault. I used to wander around the house from room to room just to get away from him. Things aren't like that anymore, but I have the same level of guilt about what I'm doing. It seems as though our life and our family aren't good enough for him. There's just this constant pushing for things he knows we don't do and have never done. He's allowed an hour of tv on weekdays and can play games for a few hours on a weekend. We use a timer for this and I do a sort of countdown so he knows when this is ending. These things used to work, but it's as though he's regressed to being a toddler and now just has a meltdown over it. If he's not begging to watch TV, he's begging to eat sweets or something. It's horrible to say, but I end up not enjoying any of the time we spend together. None of it seems natural or fun, it's forced and there's no chance of us doing our own thing and then coming together to do things when we feel like it. I have tried forcing him to play alone at times, and he'd rather just lie on the floor and cry for an hour than accept that I don't want to do anything and keep himself occupied. I used to be full of fun and come up with lots of ideas of things for us to do together and it was great, but lately I'm just counting down the hours til he goes to bed.
I feel so terrible about this and like the world's worst mom. It's as though we're just not that close anymore and I can't do anything about it. I suppose I'm asking for some reassurance that this will one day end and we'll have a relaxed, normal relationship and advice on how to deal with this now. I don't know whether my expectations are too high. But none of the other moms at the school spend their whole evenings doing one thing after another with their child. I don't have any memories of playing with my parents - I just did things by myself and had a great childhood. His seems to be filled with misery and loneliness.