I really struggle with my relationship with my son.

[Tearsandrage]

I've namechanged for this. I've got a 6 yr old boy. Very bright, funny, big personality. We adore him.

Equally, he's says NO all the time and is totally, utterly wilful. Everything feels like a battle. We put lots of boundaries in place, we try hard to bring balance to everything and yet it's never right. And he's so rude to me sometimes. The way he talks to me - the tone - as well as what he says. He's got such a strident, abrasive manner with me.

We're trying to implement new strategies for his behaviour, which are hard to sort over Xmas.

But I worry about our relationship. I worry that he just already has contempt for me.

Hard to explain. I'm quite neurotic so perhaps it's me blowing things up. And I have no other children so hard to know, by comparison, what's the norm. Although I see lots of other kids and none seem to be as wilful as him!

Thank you all.

I'm not having another child because I can't have another child. Not because of him. I would have loved another

I've decided that if he's grumpy or rude to me, that I will simply walk away and refuse to engage. If I try and talk to him, ask him to change his tone etc, he only gets irritated. I feel like I'm giving him negative attention therefore. Is this right? I'm so at a loss.

Tears, to a certain extent ignoring him is fine (and might work well at home). But you need to consider if hes rude in front of other people (or to other people) or out in public. It can be a bad idea to ignore that, in those circumstances I would be inclined to take him to one side and warn him firmly what consequence will be instigated if he doesn't apologise and behave.

How about him being allowed 5 times a day when he gets to be the boss? Within reason. Nobody can get what they want ALL the time! He could also have 5 tasks each day where he thinks of something to do to help someone else.

Thia sounds like my dd was at that age.

At 9 it became all much clearer that it was to do with anxiety and her need to be in control. She is much better because she is more able to understand and explain.

We always found any sort of sanction had an opposite effect. It either made her worse, or she didn't care.

Rewards worked best of all

I think you need to relax. Take it less seriously. He's trying the boundaries, that's fine, that's what kids do. So if he says 'Can I have three biscuits?' You say 'No, nice try mister'
You know there's no concerns outside the house, he's trying to get what he wants by pushing your buttons - again, perfectly natural. But if he sees he can get to you, he'll keep doing it, so stop reacting!

Thank you for the posts,

Hmm... this is likely a total projection but my dd (now 10) has been very like this all her life and I had concerns and was going in to school fairly regularly but being told they had no concerns.

Turns out she is very likely to be on the spectrum and school had seen a lot of issues but had covered them up/not recorded them adequately/didn't recognise them as sensory/communication/social problems and had just had her pegged as a naughty child with a difficult mother.

She is now on the pathway to diagnosis and the turning point was them being forced to fill in forms which came back the same ASD traits at home and at school at a time while they were claiming they did not see any ASD traits and she didn't need referral.

The main thing that switched me onto thinking it was ASD was being told independently of each other by numerous professionals that they felt she may be aspie and when I had read about and started implementing ASD approaches that identify and recognise her sensory/social difficulties and her behaviour literally changed overnight.

Up until then everyone had said she was fine everywhere apart from home and when things started getting bad they just kept wanting me to use rewards/consequences (neither of which have any effect at all) and send her on courses to be taught about appropriate behaviour.

She is very intelligent and she knows what is/isn't appropriate I think she just struggled to manage herself and her behaviour because she was being expected to respond to NT approaches in a NT way and very often she actually couldn't cope with the ways things were done, her sensory needs being ignored or punished and how people spoke to her.

She works best with physical stuff for learning. When she was being really demanding she responded best to a token system where she had a limit of what she could ask for that was not a need and if she wanted more she had to earn tokens from parents for doing nice things for them that are not needs.

I think what I mean is if standard parenting approaches/advice don't seem to work start exploring the idea that he may respond better to other types of parenting approaches and may benefit from a diagnosis of some kind. It is sad that this has become necessary IMO because ASD is a spectrum and everyone has some traits but the way school is now if you are not NT it is very difficult to cope.

Another here thinking about ASD. Especially at his age, pre-diagnosis, I found it the most difficult time, I didn't know why everything was so hard and he couldn't tell me!

Thanks all. Lots of food for thought. I don't really know what to think yet, so I will see how things unfold. Happy New Year.