Me and my wife are coming up on the end of our rope with our daughter (8 years old) and just completely unsure what to do. Wanted to see if anyone has experienced something like this. It seems to me like our daughter is a sociopath but maybe I’m just looking for an excuse, I honestly don’t know.Our daughter has always misbehaved but it’s a number of things about the way that she misbehaves that has us very worried. I will list a few examples:1) She steals: this has become one of the biggest issues and one that I can’t seem to make any progress on. She will take anything from anyone in the house if she wants it. She often steals snacks from my nightstand or her mother’s makeup among many other things.I have tried combating this a number of ways. On at least 10 occasions I’ve sat her down and had some variation of a heart to heart talk. Things along the lines of “It really hurts our feelings when we go work really hard and then buy a little treat and you just take it when we were really looking forward to it” or “It’s not your stuff, imagine how you’d feel if someone came into your room and took teddy away”. Pretty much all variants of that type of talk.We don’t hit our kids and I’m very firm on that but we have yelled at her, sent her to her room and I once even tried to show her how it felt by having her do a chore, paying her, taking her to go get candy, and then stealing it before she could eat it (followed of course by another heart to heart.)What bothers me here is none of this has curved the behavior whatsoever. I once had one of these talks with her, she apologized a lot and said she didn’t want to hurt her family’s feelings anymore and as soon as I stepped outside for a cigarette I looked in the window and she was stealing Cheetos out of a bag her mom left by the computer.2) She won’t do literally anything she is asked: the biggest way in which this is visible iscwith cleaning her room but also applies to homework and other things. If a big weekend is coming up and my parents are visiting from out of town or something similar me and my wife will ask her to clean her room. Usually a few times nicely, then more sternly until she’s eventually confined to her room until it’s cleaned. This will basically never happen within days. I’ll check in for the first couple hours and give her a “Hows everything coming, doesn’t look like a lot has been done yet, remember Grandmas coming let’s get started on it” and will devolve over the course of the day into “You would’ve been done already if you just did the work, don’t you want to come out and play with your brother and have dinner with the family?”During this time she will come out of her room to show us art projects she made or to randomly ask questions or just to say things like “Remember that time Jimmy fell over in the snow mom?” As is the trend these start by being met with “Oh yeah, that was very funny but remember we are working on our rooms right now” but gradually grinds into “You are to be in your room right now, until it’s clean there will be no more of this”But it doesn’t get done. Sometimes if there are no major dates coming up it can go weeks. After school she goes directly to her room, sneaks out a few times to try and watch her brothers TV or steal some snacks and inevitably gets sent back and does 0 work. She has even scammed her grandmother or uncles on a few occasions. The day of the event comes, she still hasn’t cleaned it by the time they’ve come over so she gets emotional and they enable her with the old “oh she just needs some help” and then they clean it for her. I’ve given her all the talks about family responsibility and doing your part and on one occasion even threw away all of her toys she refused to clean. No change in behavior.For her homework it’s the same. She will sit at the table for 6 hours doing nothing unless I sit there and make her do it problem by problem. If there are 10 problems solved exactly the same way and I work with her to learn how to do it, then let her solve one herself and say “okay finish off that section I’ve got to put some laundry in” she will never have made any progress when I return. She will say it’s too hard or she doesn’t understand even if she just did this exact problem with 2 different numbers.This is probably the most damaging trait to the family because it just ruins everyone’s day. You have a free Sunday and you want to get some relaxation in? By the end of the day you’ve spent half your time trying to convince her to do her stuff or arguing with her and its Just constantly exhausting. Get off work and make dinner, got an hour or two before you’ve gotta get ready for bed? You’ll be spending that on homework. I’ve sat with her for 5 hours on a few pages of homework, literally.3) Fake Affect: I had suspicions about this for many years but it’s become really obvious lately. When I was really young I used to lie a lot and as I got older I realized how foolish I must’ve looked since I was rarely called out so I’ve made it a point with my kids to call it out right away when I see it to not let it ever get in their heads that the lies are working.If she lies to me I’ll say right away “I know you are lying, here’s why, don’t lie”. This has never stopped her lying of course but recently I’ve had to do it with her emotions. I used to give her the benefit of the doubt but the first time I said “Stop this, you are pretending” her face cleared up from tears instantly into an almost annoyed face. I can’t even describe it, it was instant. Before being called out she can be wailing and saying “I love my family I’m so sorry I’ll clean my room! I love my family!” But if you call her out she stops instantly and says things like “well my brother put that stuff in my room, he should have to clean it”Those are the major issues I guess but I’ll give some other random info in bulletpoints that might be relevant:-Me and her mother are both college educated and generally speak kindve as I’ve written this, pseudo-intellectually I’d say. Her older brother is a straight A student who socializes well and is extremely helpful around the house. At 12 he even took a job helping a couple a few neighborhoods away with their pool so that he could buy his own dinners and such If he wanted to. She is a very poor student. Her reading is very basic and she can write but she’d likely spell ya least half of her words wrong. I don’t think this is necessarily due to a lack on intelligence so much as a lack of caring. She can show real wisdom about things sometimes but she doesn’t want to be at school so she pays basically 0 attention and no teachers have found a way to get her to focus or listen.We took her to a psychiatrist but I really felt scammed by our experience there. He didn’t spend almost any time with us or her, they “ran a few tests” and he said it was probably just anxiety (we were there mostly to try and see why she didn’t seem to be learning). He probably spent 30 minutes total talking to us or her.Not sure how it would be relevant but she definitely has a problem with food. She’s not huge, but she’s gained a lot of weight in the last year. My wife and son are pretty skinny and I have a bit of a dad bod but she’s the only one in the family gaining weight like that. We had to stop buying the snacks me and my wife like because she just steals them and will eat an entire box of snack cakes in an hour, leaving all the wrappers just lying on our floorsWould appreciate any thoughts and I will answer any questions I can. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/2PzPIJz
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