Seeking Advice

[melaniesc]

Hi,
 I was hoping someone here might be able to give advice on how I should proceed with this situation. DD2 is 4yo. She's always been prone to tantrums sometimes, but lately they've gotten worse. She will slap, stick out her tongue, lay on the ground and refuse to stand up, scream and sit under tables. She doesn't always do all of these behaviors during a tantrum, many times it's 1 or 2 bad behaviors during one of her episodes.
  She does these behaviors at home and at prek. When at home we've tried time outs, taking away toys, etc. but none of it has seemed to help.
   She also tends to develops short-term fixations, or OCD type attachment, to things. Like for the past month or so she's been insistent on wearing a dress every day. She also only wants to wear a bikini when she goes swimming. This past weekend I started trying to break these habits. She was really mad about the bikini and stuck out her tongue, laid down, but I was able to get her to wear a different bathing suit. The next day I also put her in a different suit and she barely had a tantrum. With dresses, she got mad at me when I put her in a shorts outfit yesterday but not too bad. However today my DH said when he brought her to preK in a shorts outfit she was upset and took off the shirt and swapped it for a different tee shirt in her bag of extra clothes.
   The tantrums always seem to be triggered by something, pretty much not getting her way on a certain thing. They're not multiple times a day or even every day. I guess I'm just wondering if I should bring her to pedi to see if I should get her evaluated, or should I keep breaking her out of her OCD behaviors a while longer and see if the tantrums start to subside more? We just had prek tell us they want to meet with us about her behavior so I'm getting concerned that they might want to kick her out.

[hopecounts]

I would get her evaluated by a specialist (developmental psych/dev. ped) and see what they say, could be just a strong willed child in which case they may have some good suggestions/ resources or at the very least reassurance that She just needs a slightly different parenting approach.
If it is something more (ODD?) that info will help you help her be more successful.
Is this a private or public PreK? If it's public write a request for an evaluation putting them on the clock to eval her, if it's private see what they say and go from there.
Hopefully, they will want to try a different approach/plan before kicking her out, which may give you time to put a plan in place for helping her which may buy you more time.