Thompson said she first noticed that Daniel was “different” when he was two weeks old. But against all odds - and with the right supports - Daniel and Nathan have grown into capable adults with hopeful futures - futures their mothers once could never imagine. Every new catastrophe brought more fights, tears, and self-doubt about their ability to be a parent. Thompson and Abraham - like countless other parents who jump from fight to fight with their kids - didn’t know where to turn.
Like thousands of kids with ODD, Nathan and Daniel spent their childhoods being expelled from school, clashing with police, and pushing those around them to the edge of sanity. It’s a persistent, excessive pattern of negative behavior against authority figures in a child’s life, lasting for six months or more. ODD is more than backtalk or the occasional tantrum.
Daniel and Nathan both have the condition - characterized by violent outbursts, resistance to rules, and a predilection for spiteful behaviors - along with attention deficit disorder ( ADHD or ADD) and, in Daniel’s case, Asperger’s syndrome. The reason, she discovered, was oppositional defiant disorder, or ODD. “And I asked, ‘Why are you doing this to me?’” The prolonged clash culminated in a screaming argument, Abraham said - one of the biggest she could recall. In eighth grade, he refused to wear clean clothes for weeks, opting for the dirtiest, most ragged outfits he could find. He stole things from his brother, he broke his father’s tools, he didn’t do his homework. By the time he reached middle school, Nathan refused to go to school most days, forcing Abraham to drag him to the car in his pajamas, hoping he would get dressed on the way. She and her son, Nathan, spent his childhood locked in a never-ending battle. He’d make holes in the walls.”Īcross the ocean, in Flint, Michigan, Kim Abraham was in the same predicament. He’d lash out, and he’d hit me and his sister.
“He’d have five tantrums in a day,” said Thompson, a single mother living in Oxfordshire, England. “Daniel has pushed me to my absolute wits’ end.” When he wasn’t knocking down another child’s block tower or throwing papers all over the floor - for no reason, it seemed, other than that he could - he was having tantrums that could last for hours. “Today has been a horrible, hateful day,” she wrote. When her son Daniel was a few months shy of his fourth birthday, Alison Thompson confessed to her diary that she thought he was “the original child from hell.”
0 kommentar(er)
