...this should be a good thing, but it's become a daily exercise as soon as he gets home from school. He doesn't say hello or properly register anything you try to say to him. It seems like he's overwhelmingly compelled to admit to any and all bad or negative behaviour that he's been involved in at school before doing anything else. Sometimes it's not even bad behaviour, but just something he thought was bad. Take this week for example...He came crashing through the door and said, "I kinda called my friend a bad name". So we had a discussion about name calling and how he shouldn't call people names. He understood, was sorry and said he wouldn't do it again.The next day, before school, we reminded him not to call people names. When he came home he said, "You're not gonna be happy with me, I called one of my friends a bad name". We found out that it happened on the way to school, maybe 5 or 10 minutes after we reminded him in the morning not to do it. His excuse? "I forgot!" and when asked why he did it, he said he didn't know. Now, he's not a very forgetful boy, and with only 10 minutes passing, we find it difficult to believe that he truly forgot. Even so, he knows that it's not nice. So after another discussion about name calling he was sent to his room to think about what he had done and how he might have hurt his friends feelings. This time he promised he'd never do it again.Guess what happened the following day? Yep, "I accidentally called my friend a bad name!". Accidentally? How do you accidentally call someone a bad name? "Well I was trying not to, but I just did it". Today is the fourth day in this series of events. I'm quite confident he's going to come home and tell me he's done it again.My initial impression is that he's looking for attention, albeit the wrong kind of attention. As such, if he has repeated this behaviour, we're going to send him directly to his room, giving him as little attention as we can.On the other hand, it really seems like some kind of compulsion or urge, where he has to inform us right away like its the most important thing in the universe. I've tried ignoring his negative flash briefing by asking him about the positive things that have happened, but he'll either continue his negative news report or circle back to it as soon he can. It creates a negative atmosphere in the house, which I feel could be avoided.He told me this morning that he was nervous that he might call someone names today. To me it doesn't compute, he doesn't call his brother names at home, he doesn't even say those words at home, so if he can do it at home why not at school? Can he really not control this sudden behaviour of name calling, or is he just looking for attention? I half worry that he may have some kind of irrational behaviour issue, but maybe I'm just thinking about it too much?At home he seems happy enough, and he gets plenty attention, maybe too much attention. It's just that moment when he comes in from school, where he offloads this negativity.In general he's a bit quirky, by that I mean he can come across as awkward and can sometimes be overly emotional. He's also easily distracted and his teacher says he's a bit of a day dreamer. That said, he's doing great at school, despite his lack of focus.Over to you Reddit, is this simply attention seeking behaviour or is there something else that I should be looking into? via /r/Parenting http://ift.tt/2yMVYki
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