I have had many challenging moments raising my son through his emotional and mental issues. As infuriating and distressing as these episodes have been, they aren’t nearly as difficult as that of child abandonment. Our circumstances are extremely complicated. To try to explain it in one blog would not do justice to depict how messy […]
My teenage son suffers not only from ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) and mood disorder but also from the emotional turmoil of parent abandonment, racial and identity issues, anger and self-loathing. In his fits of anger, my son has called me every name in the book. He has destroyed several of my belongings. He has put […]
Christmas is about a week away and while many of us consider this time of year joyful and filled with cheer and happiness, this particular holiday is a very poignant one for me. Christmas 2017 was a horrible day for me and my son. We spent most of it in a hospital psychiatric unit. I […]
What I am about to say may unsettle many but it is my truth. There’s no point in pretending it isn’t real or hiding it. My experience with parent/motherhood has been mostly unpleasant and unhappy. In fact, I have disliked most of it so much so that I don’t ever want to have more children. […]
There are countless days when I just want to give up parenting a child with ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). If this were an adult with ODD, we would have the option of just walking away and never turning back. But when it is your child affected by this disorder, that’s just not an option. My […]
Over my nearly 17 years of living with and managing my son’s mental and emotional health issues, I have learned many things – especially things that do not work. (I wish there were nearly as many things that did work because life would’ve been so much easier to deal with.) One of the things that […]
From a very young age, many children diagnosed with oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) experience a great deal of negative interactions with parents, caregivers, teachers, etc. Often because this disorder is not diagnosed immediately or parents do not know that there is a real problem to diagnose, many people quickly label children as difficult and defiant, […]
ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) just doesn’t suddenly appear. Defiance is not an innate attribute; children are not born with it. I believe defiance or ODD is the byproduct of something else such as impaired executive functioning skills, anxiety and maybe even sensory processing issues – all of which my son has displayed at some point […]
There is absolutely no evidence that ODD (oppositional defiant disorder) is preventable. If you ask me, I don’t think it is. But I truly believe that the severity and duration of the symptoms or behaviors can be minimized. As I’ve noted in the post Lessons Learned from ADHD & ODD, there seems to be a […]
I never really seriously considered medication for my son. He was diagnosed with ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) when he was 5 years old. At the same time, the doctor observed defiant behaviors but did not diagnose ODD (oppositional defiant disorder). That early on and throughout the following years, many doctors recommended medication but I […]
You're Not A Bad Parent 