Nearly at my wit's end...what do I do with him? I feel like a failure

What sorts of changes have you made to his diet? You may want to consider completely eliminating food coloring. I have other friends who have children who were like this until they cut out food coloring. Dairy may also be a dietary trigger, as may gluten or msg, which is in everything by many different names. It can get spendy, but you may find a completely whole foods diet extremely limited in sugar to help.

Parenting wise, have you read the book 'The 5 Love Languages of Children'? Determining what his love language is and filling his love cup every day could help you see positive results in his behavior. He may also feel overwhelmed with the changes taking place, so consider taking him out on a "Mommy and Me" date every couple of weeks or something to help him find his ground with you.

Good luck, Sis. I'll be praying you can find the answers. (hugs)

But should I be rewarding him by a date with mom if he is continually bad all the time? As he was making some progress, I would give him some toys back or let him watch a movie with us, but then he keeps doing bad things all the time, so the progress keeps going backwards. We've tried several things, we're not totally out of ideas, but we're really frustrated, to say the least. I haven't read the book, though I've heard of it, will look into it. As for the changes, we've tried to ease things in around here, so that it isn't too many changes all at once, but that hasn't seemed to help at all. We talk to him and he seems to understand when we quiz him, then the next day he does it all over again, sometimes in a different way, that is what is so frustrating. We think he's got it but he still keeps repeating the same mistakes over and over again. He says he's sorry, and most of the times he seems like he is, but the other part is just because he got caught and is in trouble. I know he's just as frustrated as we are, in some ways, but I'm just not sure what to do right now. At the moment, he is not allowed to be out of our sight at all and I've told him that his decision making is extremely restricted, he's on a strict schedule and mandatory chores and physical labor along side us are going to be demanded daily. The work and being outside and learning to focus will be a good thing for him, but it sure is going to test our patience to the ultimate limits. Jon has been a very good support and I'm learning not to give in, even when I'm exhausted, cause I think that's part of the problem too. All his life, he's taken advantage that when I'm tired, exhausted or busy with school, then he basically has run of the house and does what he wants, and with Jon here, that ain't happenin' and so it's the school of hard knocks. I don't like to see him struggle, and I'm sad that I've allowed it to go so far, but he has to learn sometime, cause if he learns these lessons later on, it might be too late and I don't want to get that call one day that my kid is in jail or worse. I'm keeping that in mind and enduring the best I can because I know it's good for him (and me). I keep reminding him that we love him and are doing this to help him grow up to be a good man. I just got to stay strong and focused and see this through.

If you make the just something you do unconditionally just because you are his Mama and he is your child, regardless of his behavior, it wouldn't be a reward for misbehavior. You need to make sure that along with the punishment for his behavior, you make sure his love cup is filled, otherwise the punishment will never make the progress you want it to make. I'm not saying you don't, just evaluate how much time you spend WITH him and how that time is spent with him. And given his personality, spanking will only cause him to regress, not progress.

Has he been diagnosed with any sort of developmental disorder? ASD can affect how the child behaves and how you handle it, so if he hasn't been diagnosed yet, you might consider getting him officially diagnosed so you know where to begin.

Also, start small. Give him a list of no more than two things he needs to work on on a daily basis. As he consistently manages those, add one more item, and so on. I'll check my resources and see if I have anything I can forward to you that might be helpful.

Yeah, we've held off with spanking cause neither of us like it and seeing how he has reacted the two times I have, it wasn't helpful. His only diagnosis is SPD and that is something that he is gradually growing out of, but it doesn't really have much of anything to do with his bad behavior, at least that I can tell. Starting today he will have mandatory daily chores, which has been in the works for a while but it seemed a good time to start it, so that he has some daily structure that stays steady.

The SPD might have more to do with it than you think. Sometimes things that don't seem to have much, if any, correlation have more than we realize.

I did a search for "Disciplining a child with sensory processing disorder" and here is the link to the results. Maybe you can find something in there that might help. (hugs)

https://www.google.com/search?q=disciplining+a+child+with+sensory+processing+disorder&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

Mommy to 3+1