First, a few points of procedure.
Lacie, welcome. I haven't met you yet. I look forward to 'talking' to you in more detail when you begin your own thread - that way, you will get more personal response. But a word of caution for you - you probably should remove personal identification from your ID here. WE'RE good people, but you only have our word on that. You and your daughter look like very good people, your daughter is a beautiful child. But the 'Net is a dangerous place. Also, this site specifically is one where you need to feel you can say what you need to, without fear of recriminations from people you know tracking your every word. For example, when I first joined this site difficult child 3 was attending a school where I had major concerns (and still do) about their teaching techniques, their methods of dealing with difficult students and especially their response (or lack of) to bullying. As the months progressed, my concerns deepened to the point where even at district level, I was being stymied for political reasons. I needed somewhere to ask for advice anonymously, because when I needed to take political action, it would not have been good for the various educators to get advance warning. And I do know that a number of teachers at least were tracking anything I wrote (in hard copy publications), copies were being circulated around the school. Also I had an earlier incident where stuff I had written online was being emailed to people in an attempt to cause trouble for me.
As a result - if you want the luxury of speaking freely here, you should cover your tracks.
Now back to topic - Arielle, I hope you are getting your daughter assessed by a neuropsychologist. This could just be ADHD, but she sounds to me like there could be more. I would like to see Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) checked out and hopefully taken out of the equation, because a lot of what you describe is VERY familiar to me.
What has worked for us - natural consequences. Plus we learned that we had to change direction almost completely. So much of what I was brought up with was, "Because I said so, that's why."
And it doesn't work with my kids. It worked for easy child, and for difficult child 1 to a certain extent, but never as well as backing off and being firm in other ways.
"Explosive Child" has helped us a great deal. There are other good things around too, but what "Explosive Child" did was validate my belief that if you understand where a child is coming from and work from there, it's actually a good thing. Other people were telling me I was spoiling the child, not disciplining, etc. difficult child 3 especially was the worst by far. I couldn't send him to his room because he wouldn't go. Picking him up and putting him there was disastrous. But I needed something that worked. To attempt to discipline your child and fail, is a very bad thing because you lose face and you must never do that. Before a discipline method fails you need to recognise the risk and avoid the confrontation in the first place.
Because of difficult child 3's Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD), traditional methods were doomed to fail. difficult child 3 could never distinguish between individuals. He treated everybody the same, he considered everybody to be his equal. He would read a book to a baby and expect that baby to be able to interact and communicate on his level. If a baby hit him, he would be likely to hit back, or tell the baby off, even if it was an accident from a flailing arm. To punish this in difficult child 3 as if it were a deliberate act of premeditated violence was to miss the point, and it wouldn't teach him a thing.
The aim of discipline is to teach. You need to be sure that the child understands the message; that the child is capable of making the behavioural change required; that the child is capable of remembering and that the child is NOT going to see your actions as purely revenge.
difficult child 3, in order to stop him from hitting babies, had to learn 'relativity' - he needed to understand theory of mind, which is a big problem in autism. Until he was capable of this, we simply had to watch him around babies and try to help him learn a baby's point of view. Education worked far more than punishment ever would have. All punishment would have taught him was that babies are spoilt and can do what they like to you, but difficult child 3 as a law-abiding person would have been determined to find a way to put his own justice back into some sort of balance (ie attack the baby when nobody's watching).
Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids learn by observation. They also are generally very law-abiding - to THEIR laws, the laws they work out for themselves based on their observations.
For example, we taught difficult child 3 that hitting people is wrong. This was of course undermined if we spanked him, and he told us so. So we had to find other ways to get our message across, since spanking was only breeding righteous indignation.
Then we tried to model situations for him, we read him the school rules which stated that kids who hit others would be punished.
Then difficult child 3 saw kids hitting and not getting punished. difficult child 3 would get hit by other kids, and would hit back. difficult child 3 would generally be caught, but only he would be punished. So in his own mind, the rule became, "Other kids may hit me, but I may not hit them or I will be punished. They have permission to hit me even if the teacher won't admit this to me. Therefore the teacher is punishing me by allowing me to be hit all the time, so I may as well not bother to tell anyone. It's got to be my fault because I'm just a bad person. Because I'm different."
We needed to teach difficult child 3 that his belief was wrong, but he had to experience it to understand it. We moved him to another school where hitting was thoroughly trained out of all kids.
difficult child 3 will shout at you and swear at you if he is frustrated. Tonight I was checking the work he had done today and I found some mistakes which needed correcting. He got angry, not at me but at whoever had written the study notes, for leaving out information he hadn't known. I explained tat the work had not been included because it was work that he HAD been taught, but we do know that in his earlier years he simply didn't have the language skills to take a lot of that stuff on board.
His medications had worn off, he was angry and freely expressing it. If I had allowed myself to get angry at this apparent disrespect, it would have ended badly with the work being uncorrected and difficult child 3 feeling victimised. Nothing would have been learnt behaviourally. Instead, I stood beside him and told him, "You didn't need to use that word, you could have said, 'This is VERY annoying,' as an alternative." Kids swear. We can't pretend they won't. All we can do is teach them that it is socially unacceptable, and help them find another word instead.
In days past, I would have scolded difficult child 3 for talking back to me or being rude. Instead, I stay calm and talk him down. I treat him as an adult simply because in difficult child 3's eyes, he and I are on an equal footing in most things. We each have our own responsibilities and often he treats me as if I am his hired help, with a job to do (looking after his needs). I calmly bring him back to saying please and thank you, and remind him that I'm not paid for any of this, I could walk away at any time and my job is to teach him to do all this for himself so he can be an independent adult one day.
By showing him respect, he is learning to give respect. A teacher he had once did not show him respect and so difficult child 3 would treat her as she treated him. If she shouted at him, he would shout at her and once actually told her in front of other students that she should have better manners! The trouble was, from his point of view he was right! If she had been polite to him, she could have got him to do whatever she wanted. But she was (and is) in the habit of belitting her students, being sarcastic.
And you should NEVER use sarcasm on a Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) or ADHD kid. They either don't get it, or they will respond literally.
These kids come with a huge amount of baggage. It seems every word out of their mouth is disrespectful, rude, loud, angry, defiant. But before you punish, try to think WHY. Is this a gut reaction to fear, anxiety or frustration? In which case I quietly correct, but I don't punish. Instead, I try to help alleviate the fear, the frustration, the anxiety. One common cause of explosive behaviour in Pervasive Developmental Disorder (PDD) kids (and sometimes in ADHD) is problems with task changing. Let's say you want difficult child to go wash his hands, but his favourite TV show is on. If time is no big deal, then tell him with plenty of time, that his hands must be washed, but he can do it in the ad break. Try to find ways to make it easier for him to succeed, find ways to catch him out being good, and praise him.
Think about what you know when someone has a car accident, a mild rear-ender. A lot of the time, one or both drivers will jump out of the car and verbally (or physically) attack the other driver. "You flamin' idiot! can't you look where you are going? NOW how am I going to get to work?"
And so on.
When we are on the receiving end of this, especially if the accident was not our fault, our gut reaction is to respond in kind. If we do, before long it can escalate to violence.
But why this reaction?
It's because of adrenalin. Stress. A sudden shock. Chances are, if we knew that person socially, we could find them mild-mannered, kind, considerate and polite. But fear and panic does strange things to people.
In changing how you handle your child, if your apparent main aim (to the child) is that you are trying to prevent them getting panicked, they will appreciate your efforts.
"The Explosive Child" teaches you just that - find what is triggering your child and learn to recognise the early warning signs. Then choose just a few behaviours which you think your child is capable of managing, and forget the rest (for now). Work on just those, but stop pushing if it's about to cause a meltdown. As the child calms, try again.
This works. But it needs consistency.
On the Early Childhood forum there is some discussion on this. I also wrote a summary for husband and my other kids, when for various reasons it wasn't possible for them to read the book. In writing the summary, it helped me consolidate my own understanding.
Natural consequences - these reflect what happens in real life. You cannot be blamed for the natural consequences. If your child doesn't do his homework, t he teacher will be angry and he will get a bad mark. Not your problem. You could remind him tat homework needs to be done, maybe ask if he needs any help or support, but stop short of nagging. Just remind him that the teacher will be unhappy, but if he chooses that option, then it is HIS choice. Not yours.
difficult child 3 knows that if he gets all his schoolwork done during school hours (because he works at home) then he will have the rest of the afternoon free. But if he doesn't, for ANY reason, the work won't do itself, so difficult child 3 will have to give up some play time to get it done. If difficult child 3 chooses to go play anyway, then tomorrow morning he will have much more work to do that he will be happy with. And it won't be my fault.
He still needs help with this, so I am currently rewarding him for completing a quota of work in a day. If he goes over the day, he doesn't earn the reward. It's not a matter of punishing him with no reward, sometimes things just get in the way. But just as there can be bad days, so there can be productive days when bonus rewards are earned, so it balances out. It does need to be achievable, though.
Just a few ideas and examples for you. Doing things this way has made our lives so much more pleasant, so much easier. But until husband got on the same page, he became the ogre. It wasn't pretty.
Marg
I tried to remember what the goal was and how was my disciplining getting difficult child or easy child to that goal. 
