I've been helping raise my DH's 11 year DD for the past 5 years.
When I first met her, she was 6 going on 7 and very sweet, curious, intelligent, cooperative, and pleasant to be around.
From age 8 up to now has been a slew of increasingly defiant, selfish, age-inappropriate, immature behavior. Each year worse than the last. She's looking at failing 6th grade.
She doesn't make many friends because she refuses to take care of her appearance and is visibly gross looking and behaves grossly in public. (wrinkled, food and toothpaste stained uniform, slobs her fingers when eating, gets food mess all around her mouth the way you'd expect a baby to, unbrushed hair, "forgets" her deodorant, obnoxiously burps and farts, etc.). Think of "the gross kid" in any children's cartoon you've ever seen. She's very developed (early bloomer, already 5'2 and fitting women's bras) and looks more like a 14y/o. She is looong past the point that we can monitor if she's actually getting clean in the showers like we can with her DB.
When she is out of uniform, she dresses (or at least tries to, we don't let her get away with it, her bio-mother does.) like a preschooler with no concept of matching. Her DB (5) who IS actually in preschool puts together more competent outfits than she does.
She doesn't keep friends because if someone looks past all of that and gives her a chance, she runs them off because, and I quote her, "They don't do what I want and then I get mad and yell at them." And through her own admission, she's not a good friend because "I treat them like I'm their boss."
Despite having this level of awareness, she still does not improve herself. She instead resents her peers for not just being satisfied with her grossness and bossiness. She wants to be popular but doesn't want to be bothered with learning to be an approachable, likeable person.
Imagine the movie "Mean Girls" and everything is exactly the same, except Regina George is visibly unhygienic and dresses poorly. This is what she wishes for and resents that it can't be that way. I wish I could show you the look of absolute bitterness on her face when she's told, "If you want more people to be around you, the first step is being approachable, and being approachable includes looking and smelling clean. If you want people to stay past that point, treat them kindly." Despite this, she loves to boast about how "kind" she is, and compare kind characters to herself while not displaying any of the characteristics.
She's very intelligent (scouted by Duke University for scoring in the 95th percentile on her end of year test in ELA), but mentally lazy af. She could figure out her work well on her own if she tried, but that means putting in effort. Something she hates doing. So instead, she sneakily tries to get us to hold her hand through her work from start to finish while asking questions that she absolutely could figure the answer to if she gave it even a second of thought.
She says she doesn't want to be thought of as someone who's stupid and doesn't want people to think she's stupid, but will look you in the eye and pretend not to know her ABCs, left from right, and up from down, and will argue with that ignorance into the center of the earth. She's facing the very real possibility of failing. She cries and says she doesn't want to fail and repeat a grade while still refusing to do any work, make any effort, and arguing with everyone who tries to help her. She willfully writes unreadable chicken-scratch like a preschooler just now learning despite having the ability to write on grade-level, quickly. She cries when she has to write it again to be legible.
The most frustration thing about all of this is that it doesn't have to be this way if she didn't want it to be. She wants to be popular and (quoting her) "remembered as someone who was kind and a good person" while actively being terrible to her peers. She wants the recognition the kids on Honor Roll at school get, but doesn't want to put in the effort to get the grades and refuses to even do the minimum, resenting this to point of saying she doesn't think people should get recognized for achievement because "everyone (meaning her) should be special". But of course she had no issue getting recognized the one semester that she did make honor role. If something is difficult, she tries to cut corners and ends up having to do it all over again because she didn't follow directions and botched it. If something is easy, she goes out of her way to complicate it and execute it in the most inefficient, roundabout way to point that she's tantruming about how her way isn't working while still insisting that it's the best way.
We don't know what to do about this entitled attitude she has where she wants all these great things but wants to do next to nothing to get it. She wants it dropped into her lap for free, loses interest as soon as she finds out it requires effort on her part, and resents the world for not simply changing to suit the fact that she refuse to.
We've tried focusing on positivity, praising her when she behaves well, rewarding her when she pulls up a grade or passes a test with high marks, giving her opportunities to show kindness, everything those parenting experts suggest you do when you have a selfish, defiant child. But alas, these methods stopped yielding results even when trying to keep them up months past the point of them having stopped working, hoping that if we just maintained consistency it'll resume.
DD's MO has always been "I want to do what I want to do." A cute thing she said once when she was very small, but she has been holding to that phrase to her detriment. We are at the very end of our rope.
Anyone have a similar experience? Does this get better? What should we do?