Backstory: Our adopted daughter is actually my 1st cousin's(mom's sister's daughter) child. Let's call my cousin Erin and our adopted daughter (Erin's biological daughter) Natalie. Erin has always been a very troubled child. In fact, that entire side of my family has issues and my childhood was full of emotional outbursts, alcoholism, unhappy marriages, depression, etc. I have no idea how I am the only one relatively normal, but probably because my dad was able to get custody of me when I was 11. Anyways, Erin was a smart child with a sweet side to her, but as she got older she began to get out of control and her mother was almost as bad so she was not really able to control her. She spend most of age 10-17 at boarding schools and in and out of detention centers. By the time she was an adult, she was a drug addict that slept around and engaged in all sorts of unhealthy behaviors. She had her first child in 2000 and my grandparents adopted him because Erin couldn't take care of him. He has been a major problem child who is already in trouble with the law, abusing drugs, etc.All this backstory to introduce Natalie, who Erin had in 2011 with a random guy she slept with. At this point I barely ever heard from her, but through my aunt I learned that Erin went to jail for possession of meth and other charges and Natalie who was about a year old was currently living in a home of one of Erin's drug buddies. A very unhealthy situation.My wife [F/34 at the time] and I [M/30 at the time] did not have any children but our hearts hurt for this child and we decided to take action. Erin granted us temporary custody of the child at 14 months old and eventually we permanently adopted her even though Erin is out of jail (and has never bothered to come visit Natalie)Sorry for the long backstory but its important to know where my wife and I are coming from. We knew that Natalie would be a difficult child going in due to the fact that a) she has the crazy gene my side of the family seems to have and b) although we cannot confirm it we are 99.99% sure that Erin was using meth, smoking, drinking and who knows what else while pregnant with Natalie which through research we knew could lead to cognative issues much less behavioral ones.That said, my wife and I are both stable people, and we believed in nurture over nature meaning we thought we could be a loving caring family that helped her overcome any behaviorial issues. For the first few years she was a relatively normal child, had a bit of extra energy that other children seemed to have but we figured she was on the right path. But by the time she was 4, she started getting in trouble at day care, stealing, lying, acting out, ignoring things that we told her. Her kindergarden experience last year was very rocky, she was constantly in trouble, we had several parent teacher meetings and in general her behavior was escalating. She has had difficulty controlling her emotions (throwing things, shes broken 2 ipad screens and an iphone screen during tantrums among other things, screaming, trying to hurt us and others). Now things are escalating to the point where she screams swear words at us (she screamed at my wife and called her a 'dumb bitch' the other day). I have no idea where she even knows those words. And also she has now taken to walking out of the house in anger when we turn our backs and roaming the neighborhood until we frantically find her.Adding to our challenges, we have 15 month old twin boys at home. The challenges of raising twins is something on its own difficult, and I think part of her acting out is not getting as much attention as she is used to. Having twin infants has also caused us to lose control of the situation more than a few times when parenting her because she knows exactly what to do to get us to cave on things, for instance purposely waking up the babies from a nap that we so desperately need them to take for our sanity. I am not proud to admit that we've lost a bit of control and caved when we knew that it would hurt us long term in controlling her just because we did not want to make things more difficult in the short term.Not sure if anyone is still reading this but we feel like our control over Natalie is slipping away quickly. Any punishments have no effect on her, no matter how consistent we are with it. We are afraid that she is turning into her biological mother and will become a lost cause. It keeps us up at night worrying about it. We are starting to think that we need to do something drastic to halt this escalating danger.We are looking for any advice, tips, etc from this sub. If anyone has had a similar problem child please let me know what you have tried.These are the sort of things that we've tried:Do not display anger, always be in control of the situation (this has slipped considerably since my sons were born)Make punishments consistent, do not punish unless she was specifically warned beforehand and told of the punishment she will receive if she disobeysReward her for good behaviorsShe has been to a child psychologist for the last year to work on feelings. She knows the right steps to take to calm herself down, but in the heat of the moment she loses control of her emotions and lashes outPsychologist has diagnosed her as ADHD but thus far we have strongly preferred to avoid medicationOverall we are at wit's end and very scared about the future with Natalie. Any advice is much appreciated! via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2tZAyPc
