8yo DD- tearing my hair out!

[nannynobnobs]

My dd1 has always been a 'handful'. As a toddler she was always on the go, covered in bruises from climbing/bumping/running. She chewed through an electric cable and shocked herself; she climbed up to the top shelf of the airing cupboard and had to be fetched down.
When she was five I took her to be assessed for ADHD with the agreement of her teacher (whose son had ADHD). She was climbing the walls in the waiting room like a trapped polecat, then was perfectly co-operative and meek through the tests!
Now she is 8 and her day-to-day behaviour has me screaming. She will utterly refuse to do reasonable things like getting dressed for school or brushing her teeth. She has no recognition of consequences for her actions whatsoever. If I say "You have to tidy your dolls away or I will take them away for a day" she will ignore me and carry on, then have the screaming abdabs when I do take them away.
I always follow through with what I've said. The rules are always the same.
Yesterday she was at a birthday party at one of those 'soft play' places, all monkey netting and ball pits, and her behaviour was appalling (I heard today from my friend whose dd had the party). DD ran full speed with her younger sister who is only just 3, then swung her round like a rag doll and let go, sending her flying across the hardwood floor. She narrowly missed smashing into one of those 50p kiddie rides on a metal base. DD1 then hid at the end of the party for 15 MINUTES, with DH and my friend (who was waiting to take her three DCs home) shouting her and panicking thinking that she'd got outside or been taken out. All she said when she emerged was 'my leg got stuck' which was the biggest lie in all my life. Again, she did what she wanted and bugger the consequences and bugger everyone else. We get an awful lot of lying too, even over blatantly obvious things.
Every day I try and praise the good and ignore the bad but she doesn't appear to give a shit, to be frank. She wants to do what she wants and seems to think that she will not get punished for it.
Sorry for the long post, I was dismayed when her ADHD assessment didn't pan out because at least we would have had something to work with instead of just being told 'do a reward chart'. We have done enough reward charts to wallpaper the school hall!

If one of mine had behaved that way at a party they would not be permitted to go to parties or friends houses in future until I could see a big improvement in their behaviour.

If she does not get dressed for school, why not take her as she is, nightie and all. I did that to one of mine when she was younger and persisted in taking so long to get dressed in the morning it was holding everyone up. So I told her, you have 10 minutes to get dressed and if you are not ready on time, we go to school anyway. I reminded her again when 5 minutes had passed and she still wouldn't do it, so we left the house with her in her PJ's (I took her clothes in a bag). By the time we arrived at school, she was begging to be allowed to dress in the car. She never did that again.

you need to praise the good and punish the bad. not ignore it.

as long as there is a balance - so not always negative sanctions unless they are balanced by positive.

kids need boundries. i would come down v. hard.

after all your primary objective as a parent is to raise a functioning member of society.

i think you need to sit down as a family and have a discussion - out of the blue and completely unassociated with any incident.

you need to get her to agree positive and negative sanctions.

so she thinks that she is making her own punishments and rewards.

then when she kicks off - she decided the punishment for it !

Oh I can't ignore all the bad or I'd have to wear ear plugs and an eye mask all day... I get sick of the sound of my own voice and some days after school I don't see her much at all because she's been sent out of the room so often.
With morning dressing I have devised a cunning system for getting her out of bed. I say 'good morning', pull the duvet off, pick her straight up and stand her on the floor! Otherwise she absolutely will not get up. Then I say she has 15 minutes to get dressed otherwise she has bread and butter for breakfast.
My main problem is, why is she so intractable every single day over the same things when it just means getting punished every single day? Why is she not learning that it's simpler, less stressful and more rewarding to just do the damn thing she's asked to do? Because she DOES get rewarded/praised/happy mum when she does things without a fight.
Thanks for replying!

Oh, and when we get in from school later on I am going to sit her down and explain that her behaviour at the party was so unacceptable that she will not be allowed to go there the next time she is invited (it's a pretty standard party fallback location here).

take her to school in her bedclothes.

you shouldn't have to lift an 8 yr old out of bed.

get her her own alarm clock and if she doesn't get up - lift her into the car.

Hi, would it be possible to get your daugher assessed for ADHD again as she is now 3 years older (and take a diary of incidents with you)?

Also, although I have no direct experience of this, my friends son behaved in some ways very similar to your DD. She found that as he was also sensitive to some foods (caused allergies), that restricting his diet and eliminating varioue E numbers and additives made a big difference to his behaviour - but was much harder work as all meals had to be cooked from scratch, and he took his own food to parties etc.

Finally, I sympathise totally with your frustration over DDs morning routine, but I think that if it were me being pulled from bed each morning, I would be far less likely to co-operate! Perhaps its worth trying FernieBs proposal re going to school in nightie!

Very finally, what comes over most in your post is how much you love your DD - try to hang on to that when she's driving you up the wall.

Is she just as willful at school as she is at home?

The mornings are actually easier now I get her straight out of bed! Strangely if she can't fight about it she will just get on a lot easier. Letting her get dressed in the living room has eased things too. A couple of months ago I went up to her room after half an hour and she was in her PJs, playing a game, because she 'didn't want' to get dressed! Things have come on since then in that respect, but every time something's resolved she will be fighting about something else.
Basically she behaves like a teenager, I'm wondering whether she is going to be ten times worse during puberty or whether it will all cancel itself out and she will be an obedient and pleasant teen... (laughs hard)
The assessor said one of the main markers for ADHD was consistent behaviour, ie playing up equally for parents/teacher/assessor. She was obedient and completely tractable during the tests and sat meek as a kitten!
I do try to treat both my dds equally but dd2 is a walk in the park in comparison. From the start she has been easy going and laid back where dd1 was stubborn, hyperactive, impulsive and the rest. It's now at the stage where I can see dd2 picking up bad habits from dd1 such as growling/screaming when things go wrong, pulling on people's clothes and answering back.

Lynettescavo she wants to please her teachers, she is not outright naughty at school but gets told off for talking, pushing with friends in the cloakroom, not sitting still, that sort of thing.
She is very affectionate with everyone when she is in a good mood and even hugs DH's friends when they come round to use his power tools! She just has this stubborn iron will that says she should not have to follow any rules she doesn't like, and has been this way for as long as I can remember.

I was asking, nannynobnobs, as your DD soundes a lot like my DS when he was younger...but at the time he was good as gold at school.(Now he's good as gold at home, but can be difficult at school!)

If you think she has ADHD, then I think you need to push for another assesment, or she may just be an energestic, willfull little character, who needs lots of stimulation. Having anohter, much easier chld, can magnify the behaviour of a challening child, ansd it's really hard not to make constant comparisons.

My DS seemed to constantly need to challenge the boundaries, which bemused me, as he's lived with us all his life (obviously) and we'd always been consistant...he does seemed to have grown out of that (at home atleast), so please don't dispair now what she'll be like as a teenager.

Thanks for the input, I have been wondering if I'm just being an unreasonable parent for a while now, but surely saying 'it's time to pack your colouring books away now' shouldn't have to end up with crying, being sent from the room, screaming and battle lines being drawn?
I have tried various strategies from jollying her out of the stubbornness with joking, silly faces and distraction, to the sergeant major approach "we are brushing your teeth now- NO arguments will be had about this". Nothing seems to stick though. Reward charts do work for a while but then she looks for an angle, such as working out how many red 'sad' faces she can chalk up without forfeiting her reward, trying to remedy a week of terror with a day of perfect behaviour or bargaining for a lesser reward. She has a brain, I just wish she'd use it for good instead of evil...

Is it common for children to refuse to accept the consequences for their choices? Last week things came to a head after dd1 had been asked to tidy her room for over two weeks. I gave her simple tasks such as 'put all the clothes in a pile' 'put all the small toys in the red box' etc, but she did nothing. Last saturday she was given till the afternoon to at least make an effort with her room (again, a handful of simple tasks) and again, she did nothing. She had been told from the start that everything would go in charity bags if she left it in the mess it was in; you couldn't walk through without turning your ankle on something and the floor was not visible.
DH put everything from the floor in clear binbags and she went utterly postal. Screaming, hysteria, smacking the doors and walls, name calling, slapping DH.
Obviously we didn't take all her belongings to charity- I put them in the middle of the floor, and told her that the charity shop wasn't open till Monday morning and if she wanted to keep anything from the bags then she had better take it out and put it away.
She then tidied everything away, every bit. But why did it have to come to that?! She KNOWS that we always follow a threat through. Always. I don't want to have to carry them through, I want the threat to be enough but it never is!
I probably sound like a horrible bitch but she shares with dd2, the room is divided in two by their beds in the middle and I have to walk through her dump to get to the curtains/nightlight/wardrobe. she will get a toy out, drop it, then get the next out. She tosses dirty pants on the floor when the wash basket is two feet away. Play dough and lidless pens get trodden into the carpet. School clothes get walked all over in a crumpled mess. I'm not a neat freak but I won't have her treating a shared room like student digs!