Daughter and partners relationship deteriorating and I need some clear advice.

[Rainingstars]

I’ve been with him in a relationship for over 4 years and we have a 1.5 year old together. I have an 8 year old with previous relationship (he was abusive) had no contact for years with our daughter.

To begin with the relationship with my partner and daughter was good. They got on fine and she really liked him, would often choose to sit with him and follow him everywhere. It has over the past couple of years and I say the last year in particular gone downhill. My daughter is being referred at school for ADHD which is making the situation more complicated. Around the time of contact with her dad starting the relationship with my partner deteriorated. I know he has got into her head as he wasn’t happy that I was living with another man.

Now my daughter hates my partner, she won’t respect him, she rolls her eyes and tells him to shut up. He is getting more and more annoyed and does less and less with her. This is triggering her ADHD and she is talking to him worse and worse. She said she sees him now as an enemy as he makes her feel bad.

He wont communicate with me and thinks the way to deal with it is to just ignore her. I’ve got annoyed and called him immature. He either needs to make an effort to re-build the relationship and gain her trust or he needs to go. The way it’s going it’s just unlivable. She is a child and he is supposed to be an adult. Yeah I’m sure he never wanted to sign up for this but it is what it is. What is the best way forward, it’s like a constant war and I can’t see the wood for the trees?

You don't have a diagnosis yet, just identifying traits and referral. Have you taken any parenting advice on this yet? It is difficult for him to assume the role of effective parenting her until you have a better understanding and strategies. Her defiance could be rooted not only in nd but the situation with your ex, her sd, new sibling, hormones etc but in the end there are some circumstances in which she needs to comply. You can still pull her up on her rudeness and eye rolling, enforce safety issues and establish behavioural boundaries which might help them both.

The school have given me lots of advice. They say they treat both trauma and ND pretty similar. She is very noise sensitive so have given her ear defenders. With her behaviour lots of praise of everything. Extremely low demands. She needs to know the reason for everything so lots of explanations. The thing is really until he treats her in the way she needs at home I can’t regulate her to speak to her so that’s she retains any information, all she hears is noise. She needs some boundaries but when she’s triggered she doesn’t think about them. They also said for us to choose a suitable punishment together (me and daughter). She is sorry after being rude, she will apologise but he has stopped accepting her apology.

She is a really sweet child underneath all the defences, we need to stop triggering them. The head teacher has said in the beginning to give her lots of scaffolding and to slowly move it away as she absorbs information.

I have a ND child with demand avoidance, it is an obvious difference (I've older NT child and it was a whole different ball game) and I'd say you are exactly right in your strategies. Your partner and his family cannot parent this the same way they traditionally have. I think it's like using iPhone buttons on an android phone, you just can't. You will be exhausted and need to focus on your children and not how he's sabotaging you. I would say he really needs to understand the difference, really needs to understand the parenting techniques involved and start discussing them with you (even if it's you implementing, he has to understand). If he can't really get his head around this then I can't see how he's helping or even part of the family. Give him a good talking to to give him a chance and then let him opt out which is effectively what he's doing.

Yep I feel that’s what he is doing. He didn’t sign up to this (which I find a shit attitude because life isn’t all holidays and fun). I’m tired of hearing it’s not my child. He met me and I had a child. Yeah she is difficult but we don’t know what the future holds and more difficulties will occur, we have to adapt and change.

My DD has just been diagnosed with ADHD and we've had difficulties for about 3 years, she's now 10. We dealt with the anxiety first, as that was what was presenting most prominently first. I got some really good advice and me, DP and the school all aligned on it. As part of that process I had to change my parenting and expectations. DP (stepdad) found this went against the grain of how we learned parenting his adult child, but trusted me and took my lead. He's very patient, but not superhuman so we tag teamed, taking the heat out of situations. Afterwards one of us would talk to her and she would understand. Rinse and repeat for several years. In between all that I stepped up mum/ daughter time and he would take her out in his own sometimes (she behaves much better for him on his own and they always come back happy)

She's so much better, and it's an ongoing process, but it has involved flexibility and doing some things that are counter intuitive, and trusting each other. We tried out various things at different times. If your partner could learn to be more flexible it could work, but if he isn't listening and isn't willing to adapt things it's really not going to work. Do you think he could get on board more when there's an official diagnosis in place? I received three really good one to one sessions following the diagnosis and I relayed the info from them to my partner, but if you are offered something similar following diagnosis, you could ask to do the sessions together.

If you don’t mind what was the advice you found the most useful?

Not so much advice but a learned observation, to recognise the signs and the context of DD going into a 'loop', as we described it. Once she was in the loop, I knew several hours could get wasted with tantrum, tears and refusals. E.g homework, after a while I realised it was just not working and standing my ground and getting upset was really not working. So we just stopped doing it. Now that she's going into high school next year I've started talking about it and I'm going to reinstate it from September, she's on board with that and I'm feeling confident she's now ready. Her mental stability was more important at the time.

So, similar scenario, dinner times, what's the worst that can happen if she doesn't stay at the table all of the time. Maybe sitting still at the dinner table will take her more time to figure out and she'll learn it by other methods than the traditional 'sit there until you've finished' method. You can still show by example and set the expectation that you expect her to eventually do this but just not get into a fight about it. Seems so counter intuitive, but once I got into the habit of avoiding the melt downs, I had more energy to do all the other stuff and go the distance with the constant reminders and prompts and discussions etc.