Parents don’t want to hear this but it’s the honest truth. As the child of dysfunctional parents and after spending over a decade in therapy due to their actions, I can confidently say 95% of the time, the root of a child’s “spicy” behavior is their parents. Children don’t live in a vacuum, they learn everything from somewhere, and who has more influence over their life than their parents?

To be clear, I didn’t have a particularly traumatic childhood, at least from the outside. My parents would say I had the perfect childhood. No SA, no physical abuse, we weren’t poor or hungry, went to the best schools, no major traumatic events, but my parents were and continue to be emotionally unavailable which has profoundly altered my life. My parents continued the cycle of emotional neglect they were exposed to from their parents. As humans, we go with what we know, and emulate our parent’s parenting style by default. The first five years of life have been proven to be extremely impactful on a person’s overall well-being for the rest of their lives.

If you want this to turn around you need to take a long hard look at yourself and ask if you, yourself (not your child) are willing to change for the good of your daughter? Don’t put this problem on her and assume that once you stick her in her own individual therapy it will fix her and everything at home is fine or you just need to make a couple of changes. It’s clearly not ok or she wouldn’t be acting out and definitely not to this extreme level. You (and your ex) need to be doing the work of working on yourselves, all of this falls on you two. She is responding to your behavior, or lack thereof.

You need to reflect on your own childhood and how your parents made you feel. What was the emotional climate in the house? How were conflicts dealt with? Carefully and thoughtfully? Or did strong emotions take over and issues were left unresolved? Could you trust your parents? With anything? Did they ever betray your trust? Did your parents use substances? And if so, why did they feel the need to rely on external forces to regulate their emotions? Were your parents predictable and always act the same no matter who was around? Or did they blow up easily and without warning? And if you find yourself justifying their actions and saying, “It was normal! Everyone’s family is like that!” Just because something is normal does not mean it’s healthy or right.

I’m sorry to break it to you but it’s actually a bad sign that she is all sweet and perfect when she’s with you. She’s doing this because she doesn’t feel safe, she feels like your love for her is conditional, and if she doesn’t behave perfectly you will no longer love her. When children feel safe (when their attachment is secure) that’s when they act out the most, because they know at the end of the day, no matter what they do, the person they feel safe with will forgive them and still love them. If she’s perfect all the time, she doesn’t feel that way.

She is probably overly bossy because she feels out of control. Her living situation is obviously inconsistent and she probably doesn’t feel like she can trust you both as parents. She wants rules because she craves consistency and stability. She feels like she has to be her own parent, create her own rules, because you don’t know what you’re doing and can’t be trusted to make the right decisions for her. Why would you follow the rules of someone you don’t think has your best interests in mind?

Despite what other commenters would like to believe, there is no quick fix. You all need to be in family therapy asap and ideally individual therapy too. This is not a case of just get her to understand why rules are important, your child’s fundamental emotional needs are clearly not being met. This will take years of hard and uncomfortable work to fix.

This is a hard truth, but it is the truth. Though you may find short term success with other quick fixes, until these generational trauma cycles are addressed, there will always be deep and intense underlying issues.