struggling with 5 year old

[rhetorician]

DD is 5.5 and I am really struggling with her. After some not so great behaviour we sat down and worked out some basic rules for the house and a tick chart - this worked pretty well for most of today, until bedtime, where being told that the game was over and it was time for bed resulted in her hitting me. She is in bed now, asked me to sit with her - I had a sharpie in my pocket and she wailed and thrashed and cried because she wanted it (!). This reaction to being told no is fairly frequent, although she is well behaved at school. It is like we are constantly on a battlefield about everything, and it is exhausting. It takes up so much of our family time, my time, and is beginning to impact on her smaller sister (2.5). I'm just venting really, but I am starting to wonder if I am cut out for parenting at all

I suppose what I'm looking for are tips to help her manage her anger better - she is perfectly OK when we discuss these things in the abstract, suggesting (her) that she should remove herself from a situation etc, but in practice she has proved unable to do this when the red mist descends

for you OP - it sounds like you have a difficult customer there. Stick to your guns and be consistent. Is this her 1st year in school? If so! I suspect she's very tired, so she may need a small amount of slack. Can you write down rules together?

Good luck - I hope it gets better soon.

she is very tricky indeed, although absolutely lovely in many many ways. She has finished first year of school, and (we are not in UK) has been on holidays since end of June. We were away for 10 days. But we go through constant cycles of good behaviour for a bit, followed by terrible behaviour for a while. I constantly have to re-state what I expect of her and consequences, hence the list of 'rules' - some of them are easy to comply with, and she can earn extra ticks for good behaviour, being kind etc. I guess I just wasn't expecting it to be this hard, and I am sure that people just end up thinking that we are rubbish parents! I don't think we are, but we do have a complicated, hard to parent child!