Suddenly challenging behaviour

[2bfather]

Hello. I don’t know if you’re able to help or advise on this. My seven-year-old daughter, an only child, has always been on the whole good - obviously sometimes naughty. She’s totally adored and adorable. She loves school. Recently, she started playing with some friends in the neighbourhood and that all seems fine. It can be a bit intense but there are plenty of days when she doesn’t see them.

The last few weeks she started developing not exactly previously unheard of hypochondrial behaviour. Now though it seems intense and desperate. Suddenly her feet are hurting and she wants to wear bandages to school, even though she runs around in the playground like a normal lunatic kid. Or she has a small cut on her hand and she needs excessive plastering and has to wear a bandage around her hand. This is now morphed into really bad behaviour kicking hitting throwing things and telling us we don’t love her and no one loves her. It’s challenging and of course we sometimes get cross. We are both exhausted. She seems sad and on a very short fuse she doesn’t seem to stick it anything. She won’t sit and play with a toy, although to be fair she has never been very good at that. She loves to watch TV. Of course we monitor what she watches and to be honest we do take advantage of having her distracted so that we can get on with chores, et cetera.

The other night in the bath, she said daddy? I answered yes darling. She said The other night in the bath, she said daddy? I said "yes darling?" She said "Have I ruined your life?". She seems sad and short fused. She has also developed a fear of swimming when previously she was getting on fine in her development.
She does a fair amount of after school stuff: Swimming, piano lesson and dancing. She seems a bit exhausted.
I guess my question is does this just happen sometimes and then they go through it and get over it, stronger at the end or do I need to get a child psychiatrist involved or something? I am reluctant to do that because it seems that some thing in her feeds on the attention that this stuff brings, yet I know the her behaviour is not something that she is able to control. It’s real. Something is going on in her. It’s not all manipulation for attention.

In all honesty, I feel like I’ve lost my daughter. She’s so rude and unfriendly and lacking compassion. And I fear for her.

Any advice very Gratefully received.

I honestly don’t know what to say. This might not be a good idea at all, but if you calmly ask her why she needs all that, she will probably get super angry at first, but if you very very gentil press for answers, you may find the reason.

My DD9 did something similar, kind of, we had no clue what to. During that time period we moved back down to London from Edinburgh, and her P3 teacher mentioned to us about some kind of psychologist thing but we decided not to take those steps. When we came to London, she hated her new school, and for multiple reasons got referred to her school’s Place2Be. It all stopped, and she started being a lot happier. Went back to Scotland, came back again, now she is in year 4 and the SEND team at her primary are looking at an autism assessment for her. I’m not suggesting your DD is autistic, but a lot of the time, when kids are struggling with something (so in my DD’s case, a bit of anxiety due to our many moves between Edinburgh and London, and now we possibly think autism) they don’t know what to do, and don’t get taken seriously when they try to talk about mental health, so they make it about physical health. I know you might not want to, but have a look and see if the school offers any kind of ELSA or similar services. If not maybe have a look into going private if you can afford, I don’t know what the NHS offers but wait times are bound to be really long.