4yo’s extreme behaviour – desperate for advice

[MilesJonesy]

My 4-year-old (well he turns 4 on Wednesday) son has always been a bit fiery, but since starting the new nursery term things have spiralled out of control. Last year he would occasionally hit out, but nothing like what’s happening now.

In the past few weeks he has:

• Flipped tables and turned the whole nursery room upside down (two or three times).
• Spat on toys and thrown food.
• Tried to hit staff, and last week scratched a teacher’s arm so hard it drew blood.
• Refused to let others share resources (like all the Play-Doh pots) and gone into full meltdown if asked to.

At home, it’s not much better. He’s wrecked his room in anger, smashed a glass candle jar, peed himself in protest during time out, poured water over his brother in the car, and regularly hits/spits at his sibling. He sometimes escalates so much I can’t leave him unattended even for a few minutes while cooking.

We’ve tried every sanction I can think of: time outs, no screen time, early bed, confiscating toys, putting him in his room, even withdrawing attention/not playing with him. He doesn’t seem to care about any of it – he just shrugs it off and carries on. Sometimes sanctions even backfire (e.g. peeing himself in protest or trashing things).

What makes it harder is that he can also be completely fine – affectionate, able to sit through long stories, build Lego, go for walks, or cuddle up quietly. And just this week he had two completely fine days at nursery where nothing bad happened at all. So I’m baffled as to how he can switch from that to such extreme behaviour.

We constantly reinforce “soft hands” and “kind words” at home. Nursery have been supportive – they’ve made referrals for speech and language and for a possible neurodevelopmental assessment, but the waiting list is about two years (Scotland). I’ve started looking into private options because I feel I can’t cope waiting that long.

Emotionally, I feel like I’m at breaking point. I’m stressed, anxious, and sometimes feel totally alone dealing with this. I have another child too, and it’s horrible watching him bear the brunt of the hitting/spitting.

Has anyone else had a child whose behaviour escalated like this around age 4? Does this sound like ADHD/autism/PDA, or something else? And what practical strategies actually made a difference in keeping everyone safe day-to-day?

Any advice or reassurance would mean the world right now. My eldest is 6.5 and has no problems whatsover at home or school except the odd bit of being silly or cheeky.

The idea that all ND kids “managed fine” in the past doesn’t really hold up. Maybe some did. Until the 70s, many autistic/ND children were as likely to have been caned and expelled, if they even made it to a school in the first place. They'd probably have been dumped in some other institution.

Through the 80s/90s/2000s even, most were undiagnosed, punished for meltdowns, or forced to mask. That looked like “managing” on the surface, but the cost was exclusion, trauma and the adult mental health crisis we see now. There's a reason why many ND parents of ND children have changed their own approach to their own children - because it didn't work. I'm glad you've come through your childhood unscathed with traditional parenting methods but many other ND people did not.

Schools also weren’t “overrun” because children with the highest needs were hidden away in special schools or hospitals. They simply weren’t visible in mainstream. Today’s push for different parenting isn’t about permissiveness, it’s about recognising needs that were always there but ignored. ND people have always existed, but they're only being recognized now.

As for behaviour getting worse, a big part is awareness and safeguarding: we no longer accept caning, humiliation, or shutting children away as management tools. As for screens, for many ND children, gaming and tech are also a genuine regulation tool and safe interest.

So the change isn’t that children suddenly became worse behaved, it’s that society stopped sweeping ND struggles out of sight and started recognising them, and that ND parents recognized the damage that the traditional parenting approach did to them and choose differently for their own children.

Let's also not forget in recent years it’s not that parents suddenly went soft, it’s that all the scaffolding around families has been stripped away. Sure Start gone, youth clubs gone, police numbers cut, school support staff such as TAs cut meaning children can't access the support they need, lack of SEN support, local authorities actively blocking help for children (don't get me started on the education system and EHCPs) cost of living crisis meaning more families in poverty and under stress along with benefits cuts. Of course behaviour looks worse when the safety nets have vanished. The problem is not solely down to parents of ND kids being too soft on their kids.

I'm 48, and I remember a girl in the year below me who used to regularly flip out at lunchtime, including lashing out at the staff. In hindsight it was mostly likely a sensory overwhelm causing a meltdown.

I don't really get the picking at "we only know what the OP tells us" because that's the nature of this forum. I guess it's a bit like posters who seek to draw the line just behind them "my child/I'm ND but I would never accept this/behave like that, so they're just poorly parented"

The OP is a teacher and so am I.

There's a lot of talk about improving teacher training to assist with SEND but the bottom line is we've all got too many kids and too much to teach them (and generally far too small a space to teach them in, insufficient outdoor space and don't get me started on the corridors of secondary schools). So even if you can see what might help, you generally don't have the capacity to do it.

Scotland has got the additional factor that they attempt to meet nearly all SEND needs at the school level and the expectation is kids will attend the catchment school (although on the plus side, the catchment school has to take them I think). They don't have England-style teacher shortages in the main though as salaries are higher.

More positively, my experience of parenting an AuDHD child has massively helped me in my teaching (the other way round, not so much - I trained in 2012 and got a single afternoon on SEND). I do particularly well teaching kids with ADHD because the behaviours are now so normal to me. It honestly was like a veil was lifted. I can see things I couldn't see before.

I did NOT feel so philosophical 5 years ago when we were going through the spitting and shin kicking and my marriage nearly ended from the stress (N.B. DH is almost certainly AuDHD himself and had a perfectly OK experience at a small rural primary and a by today's standards small rural secondary comprehensive - in fact he went to Cambridge where of course he was surrounded by ND!)

I've only been on MN for about 15 years but IMO the advice for SEN parents hasn't changed hugely. MN opened my eyes massively to SEN issues because I had such limited experience before. But while you see more use of terms like low demand and PDA and descriptions of nervous systems compared with 15 years ago, the core concepts of slowing down, seeing the child's perspective, explaining reasons for rules and having clear communication, being aware of sensory issues and having stable routines, keeping any consequences very mild and relying more on positive reinforcement. Meeting kids where they are and building up their skills from there, having awareness they won't necessarily ever "catch up" to same age peers in more aspects than just academics.

Maybe the shift you're talking about was earlier than 15 years ago but I remember a lot of the spaces I was visiting online for parenting advice that relied less on the naughty step etc often described methods that had originally been developed for use with children with SEN and they were finding that when they moved those techniques out of the SEN unit to the mainstream classrooms, they helped the other children too. These stories came from the 90s, 80s, 70s. I think the difference was probably that years ago, only children who were very good at masking or who managed better in mainstream were there. I've also heard teaching staff or parents of now adult DC say their children were allowed to go and sit in the library, or colour in during lessons they found hard, or a TA/helper parent found a different way that helped them read and worked for them. Whereas a friend who was working as a TA last school year was frustrated and discouraged being asked to keep slogging her pupil through a phonics scheme that made no sense to her and had limited time to let the child just read books which interested her, which was having better results. I understand why schools are more standardised and documented but it does seem to remove some flexibility. I think the flexibility was brilliant for some pupils and probably disastrous for others. But if you look there have always been children for whom the "norm" doesn't work.

How are things, @MilesJonesy?

My now 26 year old started behaving like this at around that age. It took a long time to get his treatment dialled in.

At 4, we were able to get him into a special education center with a referral. The center specialized in working with children with behavioral difficulties, and we were also required to attend sessions with a counselor every week to help us be able to work with him better. He was there for about a year, and the tools he and we gained helped for a few years.

Around 8 or 9 he started acting out again even more aggressively and running away. We ended up putting him in another outpatient program where we again had to ourselves get counceling to help us build a better toolbox to work with him. He received diagnoses of ADHD, ASD, ODD, and a few other little things. As others have said, normal parenting techniques don't work with those types of brains. What finally worked for us was getting him in that program, getting medication dialled in (methylphenedate for the ADHD, respirdone for the violent outbursts) and taking a class in a parenting technique that does work for those types of brains:1-2-3 Magic.

1-2-3 magic is a really hard way to parent, but it is so, so worth trying. It actually has helped me in basically every aspect of my life. The tricky part is that you have to stay calm. Kids know how they're supposed to behave. So they get three chances. When they misbehave you just calmly say that's 1. If they keep acting up, that's 2. If they get to 3, they go to their room (hopefully they have one of their own) because there's a chance they'll trash their stuff. And if they trash their stuff it's "oh wow, that really sucks for you. I'm sorry you made that choice."

And they get to come out and rejoin whatever's happening when they're ready to behave in an acceptable and appropriate way. My son fairly quickly got to a point where, between the medication and the therapy, he could recognize the signs that he was getting overwhelmed and was at risk of lashing out and would take himself to his room preemptively to calm down.

I know where you are. I know how hard it is to feel helpless and hopeless. There is help. It can and does get better. You've got this, mama!

So the update is:
We've gotten things rolling with a private Speech and Language Therapist, which is just about affordable. It looks like me definitely has a bit of a language delay but waiting for the first proper appointment.

We've been using the consequence of no screens and an early bedtime if he hits at nursery (so far the response has been ambivalent, I asked how he felt about no programmes and he said "me happy").

On his birthday we were meant to go get an ice cream after nursery, he hit a nursery staff member so he didn't get to go. Yet again he didn't seem to care at all.
We realised we can't afford pursuing private ADHD/ASD input, so can't do much about that.
Behaviour has been bad every day at nursery with him hitting staff and throwing things.

In the house he's been pretty calm and less resistant to doing things. However the other night he started throwing all the duvets onto the stairs so he could jump on them. Nothing I could do would induce him to stop. Not my teacher voice, not a raised voice, time in didn't work, putting him in his room. It was at dinner time and I was on my own with both kids and starving, so eldest and I calmly ate dinner and I told youngest his favourite new toy was going away if he didn't stop. Put the toy away, he did not care. He got an early night and no TV, didn't even cry.

When I ask him why he hits teachers at nursery he says "cause me want to". Husband and I feel like we're banging our heads against a wall at this point.

We've used social stories, books about not hitting, asking him to think about how he would feel if he got hit, visuals to show the consequences of hitting at nursery. I've pushed for extra support, so it looks like an Educational Psychologist will be observing him soon at nursery.

And to think before the summer he was fine. I don't understand any of this.

Are you Anerican, @lunasee? Sadly those types of settings are rarely available in the UK without a titanic battle. We've basically got whatever the nursery or school can access (might not be much) and whatever we can afford to pay for out of pocket.

There was a huge ministerial debate in Westminster about it on Monday.

Anyway, the speech and landscape therapy sounds a great idea, OP.

Dpes your son struggle to sleep? DD's had melatonin prescribed since age 7 (after 4 years of increasingly hysterical behaviour running up to bedtime). Research does seem to show that kids with ADHD are prone to sleep difficulties.

DD clonked her head hard on the skirting board at bedtime running around "being Elsa" in a large blanket at that age...

In those examples you have given, the piling up of duvets on the stairs is dangerous, obviously. But he obviously needed to jump on something, so instead of telling him off and taking his favorite toy, why not redirect him and pile all the duvets up in the middle of a room or on the sofa and let him throw himself on them? Turn it into a game? He needed to get his energy out. He got punished for something his body was telling him he needed to do. Children can find physically moving their body very regulating. If you let him regulate himself the way he needs to you'll ultimately find he's better able to cope with life. Look up the vestibular and proprioceptive senses. Build opportunities to use those senses into his day in a safe way. Swings and monkey bars can be really good as well. Mine used to spend ages running and throwing themselves at the sofa.

I'm not sure what reaction you expected from your very young child about punishing him hours later for something that happened at nursery. He doesn't see the connection and the punishments don't work, because the two things are completely unrelated. i have done similar punishments in the past with my own children and that's how i know they don't work. You already know those consequences don't work, you've realized that much sooner than i did when my dc were that age, so it's time to try something else.

He's more than likely hitting at nursery because he's overwhelmed. You're assuming that in that moment, it's within his control of whether or not he hits out, but if he is ND, he's likely to have social skills etc of a much younger child and is unable to regulate himself so as to not hit out.

Your punishments make no sense in his brain - you're connecting hitting at nursery with nice things that happen at home, hours later, so what else can he do but shrug his shoulders and carry on with his day? He's just turned 4. ND or not, he's no more capable of regulating himself without support than he can fly to the moon and when he's tried to seek out the regulation he needs with the duvets, you punished him for it.

What's nursery doing about it, because they should be noticing if he's becoming dysregulated and redirecting him and offering calm co-regulation before he feels the need to hit out.

His response to hitting the teachers "because i want to" is actually very telling. What were you expecting him to say? He's answering you in the only way he knows how. In that moment, it's the only response his just turned 4 year brain has got. He can't explain if the lights were too bright, and the room was too noisy, and little Johnny took a toy off him earlier and then Lucy wouldn't play with him, and then Miss was being impatient with him taking too long putting his shoes on and he got overwhelmed and angry with her so he hit out at her. That's why it's important to keep a diary and look really carefully at triggers.

But really, you can see your punishments aren't working. So stop taking his nice food and toys (which help to regulate him) away from him and look at ways you and nursery can support him instead. Look at it from an angle of a struggling child who needs help, rather than a naughty one who is hitting out because he's a bad boy. If it was about behaviour, he would change his behaviour after the punishments and he hasn't.

Big pile of cushions? We used to take the sofa cushions off. Those beach sofas that you inflate just by trapping air in them are good too.

These are good too - giant Inflatable dice.

It really resonated in your post when you said you could scream at him, take away stuff etc and he just laughed. For My youngest consequences just didn’t work. I had to relearn parenting.
you talked about “managing the switch” and the only thing that worked was anticipating the switch because once he was in a rage all that worked was to keep him safe and calm him down.
I read all the parenting books and settled on a strategy of laying out the expectation, really noticing him being “good” and praising him a lot and noticing the triggers … he didn’t like “no” so we tried not to use it unless safety thing, ignoring the stuff that didn’t really matter… he struggled to sit still etc.
he’s an adult now, turns out he has ADHD. His behaviour through school was not a problem .. if he was engaged he was delightful. Once he was older he was able to explain the stuff that made him stressed… he still struggles with transitions so things like changing classrooms etc but we would talk to him about it, organising his stuff, having people take his stuff… he learned how to share a lot later than his peers but we kept pushing it.
he definitely saw the world differently and we tried as parents to tune into that. Good luck, we were told a lot to be firmer and lay down the law but it didn’t work. We had zero tolerance on hitting others which worked as long as he wasn’t already in a rage. He doesn’t rage now btw! He’s a lovely young man

I agree with all of this. I don’t really see taking duvets off beds and playing with them as a naughty behaviour though…maybe my parenting tolerances are too low 😂. My kids regularly mess up the house in this (harmless) way, if they are playing happily and not fighting or breaking anything then I’m fine with it. They can put the duvets / sofa pillows etc back when they are done.

our trampoline was the best thing I ever bought my ND three. My eldest is 9 and now takes himself off to bounce on it when he needs to calm down. They all use it daily. We bought it second hand off ebay so it wasn’t expensive, but did get a v big high quality one that will last all the use. Also sensory hammock swings and monkey swings in a tree outside - also used daily by the kids for regulation. Could be hung from a swing frame instead if you don’t have a tree.

In my opinion, his behaviour at nursery isn’t your problem. He is so young that he is acting in the moment and needs consequences in the moment - therefore it’s Nurserys problem to figure out what he needs. You can only do what you can do, to help reinforce what they are doing, regarding his behaviour at home. But you all need to be on the same page, so maybe have a meeting to discuss what techniques they are using

My DS was very much like this. His nursery setting had an educational psychologist in and he behaved impeccably whilst she was there!

we found giving him a timed warning - e.g at 9am everyone will be sitting down. Or with ‘punishment’ he would understand there would be an end time- e.g you need to sit there and behave and and can join in paying at 10am or in say 6 minutes……..he could tell the time properly at aged 2 so this worked!

Sone of it was put down to maturing a little slower and his speech being a little slower than his peers and a lot of the bad behaviour came from frustration. He was very bright so would complete tasks quickly not understanding others didn’t so he would disrupt them

School also developed his ‘special book’ where they wrote down all the things he had done well that day and the teacher would also tell me

he did eventually grow out of it - things were very difficult til about year 5? He was seen by SALT and CAMHS and they helped with ways to de-escalate his behaviour and reward good behaviour

Teen was difficult - he punched his wardrobe doors til the broke. Light switches but these incidents were very few and far between.

He’s now 23 - is very gentle and has lots of friends but still finds it difficult when things go wrong - eg his car breaks down. He will sulk or cry but we just talk it through and he’s ok

I guess I was so upset about him throwing the bedding down the stairs because it was four duvets, all the pillows, every single one of his brother's soft toys (about 30 of them) and then he went into cupboards and started to take out all the folded sheets. Before he did that, his brother and him were making a "landing pad" to jump on. They do it in the spare room and it doesn't bother me because I know they'll tidy it up after. But throwing everything down the stairs is new, and unsafe. I did say he should put the things in the spare room or hall but he was completely single minded and wouldn't respond to anything. It's like he's not really there at times like that.

Using too many words can escalate someone already in sensory overload.

I can't stress this enough. In fact I trained my teaching assistants (i spent my entire teaching career in special schools) to manage behaviour with as few words as possible. There's nothing that winds up a distressed/angry/anxious child, then being talked at. Often we wouldn't speak at all

While I'm talking about words, and as you've already mentioned his aversion to it @MilesJonesy , avoid 'no'. In the classroom we used 'finished' instead, alongside the makaton sign. So 'no spitting' became 'spitting..finished' in a firm tone with firm signing and facial expression.
It's hard to put across just how much more effective it is. But it really made a massive difference with oppositional children.
Just another tool for your toolbox.

One of my child’s friends is like this. The only thing that sorted it out was 1 hr of moderate to intense activity every single day + a nursery that let him run around all day + a strict 5pm bedtime.

It sounds to me like he'd really enjoyed the game with his brother and wanted to continue and make it bigger and better. I'm not criticising your reaction to it, because we're all just trying to live and get the basics done, and having a child set up a death trap game whilst getting all the bedding dirty is hard to deal wirh when you've got a zillion things to do.

This is where an OT assessment can be useful; finding equipment that helps regulate safely. But I hear you on the financial side. Have you looked into applying for Child Disability payment? Maybe nursery could help re evidence etc.

In that case i would agree put a stop to it - they don't need to be hurling themselves down the stairs and getting literally everything out would be annoying for anyone. Id not have been impressed if mine pulled out all the clean sheets. Could you have got involved in helping them to build the (safe!) landing pad (rather than directly telling him not to do whatever he was intent on) with what you're happy with where you could still get on with what you needed to be doing and keep an eye on them?

Mine find squishmallows really good for regulating - they can pile them up and throw them around, they are good for a cuddle as well if they're upset. With Christmas coming up a few big squishmallows might be helpful if you think he would find them useful. Weirdly mine also love to throw the squishmallows down the stairs but haven't yet thrown themselves down. They seem to like to see what happens when stuff goes down the stairs so i have had to have words with them about what's safe to throw and what isn't. If you don't want them to throw stuff down the stairs, (understandable) then what about working out some kind of game where something is safe to throw? Throwing toys at the sofa, or some kind of target game? Redirecting them rather than stopping all together?

@Needlenardlenoo
Yes, I am American. And I do realize that those kinds of services are, unfortunately, more readily available where I am. That's also why I included the medications that ended up being helpful as maybe a base of things to talk to a doctor about. I know medications need to be tailored to the child, but just as a maybe try this, or at least talk to a Dr about it.

But the big one is the 1-2-3 Magic. That book and the parenting advice I got from it, seriously, I cannot recommend that book enough. And I imagine that even if you can't get the same interventions, you can get a book.

My now 15 year old was very similar, he's autistic (and I suspect ADHD) with a pathological demand avoidance profile. Rewards and consequences don't work like it would with a neurotypical child. Read "the explosive child" by Dr Ross Greene, it's a life changer I promise xxxx

We're also, I'd say, less likely to be prescribed medications here (especially for a 4 year old!) as doctors are judged on prescribing rates and are encouraged to keep them down as the state picks up the tab (everything has to go through a "general practitioner" aka GP here and there is heavy gatekeeping of access to paediatricians as they are relatively few in number).

I don't know what medications you'd give a 4 year old tbh.

To get the melatonin that transformed our DD's sleep required 3 grand on a private ADHD/ADOS assessment, paying for a month of it ourselves and then persuading the GP to take it on.

Books are good though. I probably recommended "10 Days to a Less Defiant Child" earlier in the thread. All the really useful books I've read have been by American practitioners (and one Aussie). You just have to mentally translate any healthcare and education stuff that doesn't carry across very well. I guess it's a much larger market and practitioners are more likely to write books when they have customers/clients rather than whoever the NHS sends them.

I liked Dr Ross Greene's approach but I found the 10 Days book actually gave you practical tips for what to do. Once we'd made a list of what DD "has difficulties with" (Greene's wording), we felt quite depressed as the list was so long!

YY that is the problem with Ross Greene's approach - it's a brilliant theory and idea and I do agree with him in principle.

In practice it just takes too long to work through every single issue that way and in the meantime if siblings are getting hit or the child is in danger of being excluded from school, losing friends etc it's not very much fun. And parents have very little to give to the method when living in survival mode.

I think it's more helpful to use that kind of thing as a helpful sort of road map for issues which can be tackled a different way, but I wouldn't use it exclusively - it seems to help to incorporate other things as well. Or if you're already doing more of a low demand approach, then something like CPS would be a good way to have some direction rather than just removing all demands being the goal in itself.

I guess what tends to make me bristle with some of these is the assumption that children must obey adult orders at all times. I've never wanted or expected that but I do want respectful discussion and consideration for others' needs and experiences. I am quite happy to negotiate and find a win win solution, but I don't want to be threatened and hit/shouted at. However I do find the vast majority of things even if they do include some inherent assumption that children ought to defer to adults at all times and children ignoring adult directions is a major crime, can be used effectively without that expectation being present in the first place. Some of them fall down without it. But some work fine.

I came back to comment as soon as many things you said sounded familiar and I thought I’d share a little more of my experience in case it helps at all.

1. “me angry” with my son I noticed he had big emotions. When he was happy he was really joyful and fully happy, when he was sad he was incredibly sad and distressed, when he was angry he was screaming with anger. It helped to consistently notice the emotion and name it but also give him strategies to help eg if playing a game with his brother we might remind him before hand that if he lost he might feel sad or angry and that was ok. If he was sad he could have a hug and if he was angry he could punch the sofa cushion but what he couldn’t do was launch the controller at the telly or punch his brother. And there was a consequence to that. It requires the patience of a saint and consistency but as his communication improved and he could recognise emotions, when he was in junior school, it really helped. When he was anxious he was really anxious but he would talk to us about it. throwing all the sheets down the stairs. He didn’t seem to recognise that using his duvet and pillows to make a den to roll about in was ok and i didn’t mind but throwing all the sheets down the stairs including taking clean sheets out of the drawer would make me cross. Things often escalated like this, where he didn’t recognise the same boundary as my other child seemed to pick up more instinctively. I kind of understand why they seem similar to him but different things to us. It helped to try and anticipate what the escalation might be and direct him to what was acceptable. Trying to keep one step ahead and think with his brain was challenging but we learnt when he was quite small that what seemed really obvious to us, anc my other child just seemed to pick up on quite easily, he just didn’t see it and we needed to help him to see it. Sorry I’ve not explained this well but it was like a risk assessment “this activity looks straightforward but what might be the outcome if it escalates and what’s the best way to keep him focussed without putting ideas in his head” .
   you sound so thoughtful and caring for your son I hope things settle down soon