Apologies in advance but this will be a long post as it's complicated
We've been married for nearly 15 years have a 13 year old daughter and 9 year old son
Over the last few years the family situation has got progressively worse and whilst there are many other contributing factors, most of the problems centre around our son. He has boundless energy and is contantly on the go but he is also very attention seeking and will go out of his way to be noticed, good or bad. He deliberately goads my daughter who doesn't seem able to ignore it. He will push all of the wrong buttons which despite our best efforts ends up in a shouting match. He constantly answers back, refuses to do as he's told, blatently lies and is generally incredibly annoying. Individually he is much better because he obviously doesn't have to fight for attention and there are no similar issues at school. We both work and I am away quite a bit with work but he was like this when I worked more regular hours. We have kept on thinking that as he got older it would get better, but if anything it's getting worse
We have tried positive rewards as well as the negative ones, none of which have worked. We also try to be as consistent as possible and "pick our battles" but manners are extremely important to me and I do struggle with outright defiance.
I'm getting worried that the family is falling apart and it's worrying that I actually am quite glad to be away from home becuase I actually get away from the "war zone"
We do not think he has ADHD or something similar as for every matching symptom there are 2 or 3 contradictory ones. I have seen the GP, but I was told that a middle class family with such a problem would not be a priority.
I have thought about family counselling as we would really like to understand what he is thinking, but it is really expensive to go privately. I'm sure he thinks we all hate him, which is not true, but why does he keep on upsetting everyone? For example, last week we all went on holiday, he made a nasty comment to my daughter so she stopped playing with him. He started shouting at her so we both interjected that actually HE was in the wrong. He then stomped off as usual. After I while I went to look for him. I eventually found him and he then got stroppy with me because "you don't care about me because you didn't try to find me"
As I said at the outset there are other factors here, my work, my wife is a very stressed houseproud person, our hormonal daughter etc but we really don't know what to do next; we can't carry on like this for much longer
Apologies again for the length of this (my first post) but I'm hoping there are some of you who have (and hopefully resolved) a simialr situation
Yours in hope
Dave