Struggling with 5 year olds behavior, getting to the end of my rope. What do I do?
My daughter just turned 5 and has always been a very sensitive and overly emotional little girl, and struggles with big feelings and regulating her emotions. I chalked it up to “it’s just a phase, this is normal” but now I’m not so sure. Now that she is 5, I feel she is too old to behave the way she does, particularly when things don’t go her way or the fun she is having has to come to an end. Right now one of our biggest struggles is leaving people’s houses and people leaving our house, because she doesn’t want to leave someone’s house and she doesn’t want whoever to leave our house. It also occurs if we go out in public in certain places and have to leave. It ends the same way every. single. time in an intense meltdown and we are left feeling embarrassed. It’s getting to the point where I don’t even want to go anywhere or have people over because I know how it’s going to end. We also deal with it on a daily basis because her and her dad play A LOT after he gets home from work every day, so if he says it’s time to settle down for bed or if he needs to stop playing to do something around the house, it’s a meltdown. She is argumentative and tries to negotiate every little thing.
As a baby she had some sensory issues, particularly with loud noises and things getting on her clothes such as food or something spilling on her and her clothes. She still struggles with loud noises.
Anxiety? She has anxiety over pretty much everything. The smallest things. Any mention of going to any kind of doctor, she breaks down. I am particularly worried about dentist visits, I truly feel they will have to knock her out to do anything, even a cleaning. She is just afraid of everything it seems. When she was 3 she was terrified of the shower head and I would have to remove it from the bathtub. One time she accidentally turned it on and it petrified her. There’s just a lot of things that she is afraid of or has anxiety over that a lot of kids don’t. With this I will mention pain tolerance, VERRRY low. The tiniest scrape she freaks out over and obsesses over it and I truly fear the day she gets an actual true injury. She refuses bandaids for anything because it hurts to take them off.
As a baby and young toddler she was afraid of men, even her own uncles that she was around frequently. Before she started preschool she was afraid of boys, older boys in particular. When she started preschool, there was a boy that was big for his age and if he was out on the playground when she was, her teacher told me she would cry and not want to play and would isolate herself. But she told me that he rawred like a dinosaur in her face one time. As time went on it got a little better, but she is still kind of weary around boys. If we would go to a playground and there were boys there, she would want to leave and go to a different playground. I don’t know if it’s because they are rougher or what.
I plan on bringing everything up to her pediatrician at her well check this month, but I am seeking insight from other parents that are going through the same thing or have, if this sounds alarming or it’s all in my head. There’s things that I am missing to mention but at this moment I can’t think straight, from an outburst we had this evening over her cousin leaving our house because it went on from the time they left up until bedtime so I am checked out.