If you’re Dealing with ODD at home and you’re willing to do anything just to make the problem go away, please take a moment to read this. (And for Pete’s sake, hold on to your money.)

When your child has been diagnosed with oppositional defiance disorder, it could feel as if you have been sentenced to suffer some kind of sick punishment for all your naughtiness while you were a child.

After all, a child diagnosed with ODD is truly a pain to handle.

However, pain or more pain, don’t lose hope. There are methods and techniques in dealing with ODD that can help you. You just need to look for them – and exercise some patience while you’re at it.

The important thing is that you avoid wasting your MONEY on treatments that don’t work. You definitely don’t need those.

What I suggest here is for you to get acquainted with treatments that are inexpensive and that only require you to invest your own time and effort. Techniques that target behavior are a good start.

By taking the time to learn skills in dealing with ODD and exerting effort in healing your child yourself, you become directly involved in the transformation of your child.

You don’t even have to step out of the house to accomplish that.

Here are a couple of tips that you can take from me and apply at home. I learned these from Dr. James Lehman, a noted behavioral change therapist.

Do not allow your child to use his ODD diagnosis as an excuse for inappropriate behavior.

Enough is enough. You have to put your foot down. Otherwise, your child will spin out of control. And believe me, he will.

You must therefore, teach your child to take responsibility for his actions. Do not allow him to hide behind his ODD to get away from the consequences of his bad behavior.

And never make excuses for him on account of his ODD. Believe me, that’s where he patterns his “I can’t help it, I have ODD” excuse.

Let there be consequences for inappropriate behavior.

So, once your child crosses the line, enforce consequences. You must train him to expect consequences. That way he has a choice. Providing a choice always gets a better response.

Don’t just fly off the handle because the child refused you a simple request. Always try to reframe your requests to include a choice. Don’t just make him do something. Soften your approach a bit and give him an opportunity to make the decision to do it.

And don’t worry. The consequences that you will have to enforce upon him will always be there at the back of his mind the whole time he is deciding. It is a powerful motivator.

Use the task-based consequence to teach your ODD-diagnosed child.

A task-based consequence is a consequence that has been proven to work better in dealing with ODD afflicted children.

By relating the consequence to the inappropriate behavior, the child can draw a lesson from it. If he messes up the room, he will be appointed as janitor. If he is rude to somebody, he writes a letter of apology. So on and so forth.

Once he knows there will be consequences, he would know better than to repeat it. Of course, in reality it could take a few tries. But he will learn it.

Dealing with ODD is not a simple matter. But if you commit to healing your child of this awful affliction, you will have to accept that you have a long and hard journey ahead of you.

If you want to learn more skills in dealing with ODD, let Dr. Lehman help you with Total Transformation – his at-home child behavior change program that teaches you how to transform your ODD diagnosed child.