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I kind of relate to your kid. Diagnosed with ADHD, have a bunch of autism symptoms but was never evaluated for it, had teachers say I had ODD but also was never evaluated for that. Personally I think ODD is the most stigmatizing for kids out of the bunch.

 

I'm on meds for ADHD too, though I wasn't as a kid. Though I just get distracted and rambly when they start to wear off. (Like now, haha.)

 

I was violent as a child. I loved animals and was mostly good to them, but even then sometimes I would get strange moods and bully them. I regret those a lot and I'm glad I grew out of that as I matured. It might honestly not be a good idea to have pets in the home that he's able to harm. However, if he's emotionally attached to the animals, getting rid of them could be complicated. Telling him his beloved pet is going away because he was bad could be devastating, especially because impulse control issues means it wasn't really a choice.

 

I know people don't usually like parenting advice. But this sounds like an overwhelming situation to be in, and not a lot of people can actually relate to your kid or understand how he might be feeling or why he'd behave that way. I'm in a rare position as someone who can relate to some of that from the kid's perspective and articulate things he can't. Most perfectly good parents wouldn't know how to handle a kid like that, but you're the one in the position of trying to figure that out, so I hope this can help.

 

First off--it's possible you don't spank or use corporal punishment at all. Spanking doesn't cause this behavior, he has neurological differences from other kids. But spanking definitely throws gasoline on the fire if the kid is already like this. My mom did spank me sometimes, and I still love her and consider her overall a great mom. But having violence modeled just made me more violent. There are studies showing that kids that are spanked have more violent behavior, which decreases when spanking in the home stops. Whether spanking is okay for kids without these issues is pretty hotly controversial, but spanking should be absolutely off the table for kids with impulse control issues and violent behavior. If he has been spanked at home, don't beat yourself up over it though, just change it. It's a pretty normalized parenting behavior for a lot of us, and sometimes overwhelmed parents don't know what else to do.

 

Kids with this set of issues have dual problems of overstimulation and understimulation, and sometimes finding middle ground between these seems impossible. I can say confidently that the majority of my nastiest violent behavior, including randomly hitting my mom, was motivated by boredom. That sounds horrible, but kids with ADHD really do experience boredom very differently. If I hit her, something at least happened. If she tried to ignore it, I could escalate until she was forced to defend herself. Trying to fight her while she tried to fend me off was a game to me. It was one of the only games I could reliably get access to. (The same was true, I think, for when I bullied animals.) It was physically and mentally engaging. I needed to do something with my body, I needed to get attention, I needed to alleviate boredom, and I had impulse control issues, so I picked fights. It was almost like a form of fidgeting. Bored, being ignored, start hitting, game starts.

 

A rarer form of violence may happen when the kid is overstimulated. This will look very different. An understimulated kid might smirk or laugh as he hits. He looks a lot more controlled, and if you try to leave, he'll follow you and keep hitting. An overstimulated kid is more likely to be crying or screaming, and hit defensively if you come too close or try to touch him, but not follow you if you walk away.

 

Overstimulated kids should always have their stimulation level lowered. That means getting them to a quiet place where they can be alone and ground themselves. Avoid asking them questions, even though it feels very natural to ask something like, "What's wrong?" or "What do you want?" or "How can I help you stop this?" Communication becomes extremely difficult for the kid in these situations, and executive function being at its limit means they aren't able to make decisions or prioritize one thing over another. You can ask him after he's calmed down if there was anything he wanted to tell you when he was crying before, but in the moment, just lower stimulation. For me personally, a drink of water would also help me stop screaming when I felt like I physically could not stop. Maybe in a sippy cup if he seems likely to thrash and knock it over. Putting it near him rather than handing it to him is less overwhelming if he's not reaching his hand out for it.

 

Contrary to popular belief (including by some professionals), empathy and autism isn't as simple as low empathy. Some autistic kids do also have low empathy, but sometimes empathy isn't linear, and sometimes they actually do have empathy, but have trouble understanding what to do with that information (for example, they understand you're sad, but they don't know how they should act if someone is sad so they don't act differently) and they may also have a lot of problems relating to communication, so they may fail to communicate their own emotions in a way others can understand a lot. Because they're not communicating their own emotions normally, they don't have appropriate responses to their emotions modeled, and they don't osmose how to act when they see those feelings in others. What I mean about empathy not being linear is that some autistics have perfectly good "theory of mind" (they understand that you don't know everything they know, so if they took your pen and hid it they know you don't know where it's hidden) but have trouble reading facial expressions, while others read facial expressions fine but lack theory of mind. Autistics may also be overstimulated by eye contact, and therefore see facial expressions less and have less experience reading them. For me personally, I also have a bit of mild face-blindness, so while I'm not completely clueless about facial expressions, I'm often oblivious to subtler signals most people would pick up on. This doesn't mean I don't understand that other people have feelings. On the other hand, impulse control issues and general "knowing what the heck to do with myself" issues mean that even if I understand a behavior is hurtful and I don't wish to be hurtful, I may not know what else to do and feel compelled to do the hurtful thing.

 

You may be thinking, "well this is all well and good in theory, but what the heck do I do about my son physically abusing me?"

 

That's a complicated question to answer, because the problem is understimulation. That means that, if you give him stimulation, you reward the behavior, but if you avoid giving him stimulation, you increase the cause of his behavior. You can make the behavior less common by keeping him constantly distracted, except that it isn't possible to keep a fickle ADHD kid constantly entertained with no lapses into boredom. Which means that ideally, intervention should happen before the violent behavior, not during.

 

You may notice that there are "tells," when your son is working himself up to violent outbursts. These are ideal moments to distract him. Since the stimulation he's seeking is physical, some kind of physically demanding activity would be ideal. He also very likely wants your undivided attention. Eventually he is going to have to learn he isn't entitled to have your attention on demand and has to respect boundaries, but right now, deescalating from violent behavior is the priority. Like it or not, he's already getting your attention every time he wants it. Switching to him getting it nonviolently is still an improvement. It might also be that rather than the physical aspect of it, the stimulation he likes is the feeling of competition and your attention. There could be other types of games he'd consider just as good or better. This may require a fair bit of experimentation and creativity to figure out what exact type of stimulation he's craving and how else it can be met.

 

But you can't catch it in advance every time. He needs to learn a way to request an alternate activity. Obviously, the first challenge is finding an activity that meets the same needs he's meeting by hitting. He's a child, he doesn't know what he wants or why he feels this way, he just has a sense of an unmet need and the habit that behaving this way met his needs in the past. Breaking habits is hard. Something that makes hitting especially attractive as a "game" is, if he asked for some other activity in the past and you were busy, you may have just said no. Hitting is a game you can't say no to. This doesn't mean that he will never learn boundaries or that it's okay for him to never hear no. But his instinct, as a child with unmet needs, is going to be to take the path of least resistance to meeting his needs. As long as he knows there is a game he loves that you can't ever say no to, games you can say no to can't compete. Again: stopping the violence is #1, teaching him boundaries and respect for others comes when he's not actively hitting you. The less he's in the habit of hitting you whenever he's understimulated, the less automatic that behavior will be. When you're fighting automaticity, the first thing needs to be disrupting that. Automatic behaviors are the hardest to exert impulse control over. The more automatic it becomes, the more needs he may try to meet with it. It might start with boredom, but expand as a coping mechanism for sadness, or hunger, or any other unpleasant emotion.

 

The other side of this is that hitting needs to stop being rewarding. It's rewarding because you interact with him, you make interesting sounds and struggle to defend yourself and you drop what you're doing and pay attention to him. It isn't very effective to simply avoid emoting, because what you will get is escalation. This trick ALWAYS worked before, so he won't accept it just not working. If a bruising punch in the thigh isn't making you react, what about biting? What about climbing on you and poking you in the eye? Something will get the familiar wanted stimulation to come back. He believes you don't have any recourse but to give him what he wants.

 

Putting a physical barrier between you--such as locking him in a room, or locking yourself in a room, can cut off the stimulation. Of course, he won't take this calmly. That's a recipe for an extinction burst from hell. He's going to scream, destroy property, and shout anything he can think of at you to meet his needs.

 

But you won't get him to stop the behavior at all if he has no alternative way to meet his needs. If you have a need, a way you're accustomed to meeting it, then the way you usually try stops working but no other way exists, you're just going to try the familiar one harder. Extinction works best when it's paired with redirection and alternatives. The familiar behavior being less rewarding needs to happen at the same time as a new behavior providing the old reward. He should especially be encouraged for actively asking for the new, non-violent game--and even more so if he does it before doing any hitting at all.

 

Telling him that hitting is wrong and makes people hurt and feel sad is important too, but the thing is, if he feels he has no choice but to hit, knowing that what he does hurts people and makes them sad is likely to just fill him with shame without changing his behavior any. It isn't good to make him feel fundamentally fucked up without him feeling empowered to change that. Telling him "you just need to change" isn't the same as him believing he can do it. Telling him that hitting is bad works way better if he has a "good" alternative behavior he feels he can choose instead. We all want to feel we can choose to be good. Knowing we keep doing the bad thing even though we know it's bad just creates a hopeless feeling of being evil and tainted, which doesn't help a person change.

 

Distress tolerance is a skill taught in DBT which can be highly useful to people with impulse control issues. But distress tolerance is hardest to learn in the midst of overwhelming distress. Tasks which require a lot of patience can indirectly teach distress tolerance. This includes things like doing jigsaw puzzles, building models, sewing, knitting, weaving, and so on. Games or crafts like that aimed at kids younger than him may be easier for him to focus on, but that will grow with him too.

 

This is one you may not be able to implement, but I find school environments to often be incredibly toxic for kids like this. People think the structure will eventually tame them, but in actuality, some children never accept that rigid, unforgiving environment. These kids go on to be expelled, get sent to military school or behavior modification camps, get sent to juvie, become inpatient in psychiatric facilities, or tragically, commit suicide. (The connection to school shootings isn't wrong either. But it should be noted that school shootings are often murder/suicides, and being suicidal is a fundamental component of that. It's not something people who have hope do.) I was more or less on that path as a kid. My run-ins with authority figures in my school were getting bigger and having more consequences. Getting out of the school environment early was the best thing that could have happened to me. I think my mom saved my life by letting me stay home.

 

For some kids with more moderate problems, having a bit of structure and the chance to make friends is helpful. But for kids like this, being dominated by teachers and bullied by peers day-in and day-out can really just make their behavior more extreme and desperate and make them less rational, less controlled. What's often called "ODD" is really a fundamental mismatch with the standard teaching style. I have never respected authority a day in my life. I can learn to respect people as humans and as equals, and I can learn to be kind and compassionate and to consider other points of view and try to understand where people are coming from and deescalate conflict and follow sensible rules, but the moment someone makes an appeal to authority to try to control me I flip into resistance until death. I've been brutalized by police, and this was a factor in it. No matter how much pain they put me in, I was incapable of submitting to them, because fighting was my fear response and they just kept ratcheting up the fear more and more. What people read as defiance is to me fight-or-flight. It's sheer animal terror. I lose reason, I respond like an animal. The overwhelming emotion is fear, even if I look scary rather than afraid. Animals who turn and fight a threat aren't angry, but afraid. When I'm cornered and can't run and an authority figure escalates and escalates with me and expects that eventually I'll have to relent, they don't realize that the more they escalate, the more frightened I become, and the more scared I am the less I can reason and the more furiously I resist. Respect for authority is basically the belief that it's okay when some people have and use power over you, because that's allowed. What people call "ODD" is basically when all uses of "power over" read as abusive/threatening and trigger a fight-or-flight response. All teachers are abusive and threatening to such a child. Even ones they like. (Hey, people liking their abusers isn't new.) School is not an environment they can really adapt to. It's an institution that hides its failures. Kids who get those bad outcomes are the kids who can't change their behavior under duress, no matter how intense the duress gets.

 

I understand that due to financial reasons and so on, taking him out of school may not be possible. But if it's just concern over having him at home more being unbearable or fear that he needs to learn to adapt to school, I honestly think school makes kids like that worse, and that it will easier to calm him down and get the violent behavior to stop if he's not in school.

 

It won't make it easier for him to make friends, but being bullied with no friends is worse than being chill with no friends, trust me. Helping him find other kids to make friends with is also going to be a lot easier when he's not the weird kid who hits.

 

Medication-wise, I'm assuming he's on stimulant medications since they wear off. My doctor gives me an XR pill for the mornings, and an SR pill to split and take half in the morning, half around noon. This helps keep me relatively level all day. I also take wellbutrin, which is an NDRI antidepressant with some benefits for ADHD. The stimulant actually also helps my mood, but the wellbutrin stays in my system a bit longer. The wellbutrin also, I feel, helps me feel more "myself" while on the stimulants. It's protective against the loss of creativity I would otherwise get, while I still get the benefits of the stimulants. Using stimulants in children is controversial, mostly because the appetite suppression can stunt growth. But I do think it's a calculated risk, depending on how bad the kid needs it and how much the medication helps him. It may well be that he totally needs the meds right now, but in a few years, with other interventions, he may have calmed down enough to only need an NDRI like wellbutrin or strattera. He may want a stimulant medication later on as an adult, when the risks are mitigated since he's done growing.

 

On the topic of martial arts, I asked for lessons as a kid, and my mom also didn't think I should have them because of my violent behavior. I didn't get them, so I can't say conclusively how it would have been. I did martial arts later, as an adult. As an adult, my experience with them was positive. The physical discipline required increased my distress tolerance. But if I'd had them as a kid, I can't honestly promise I wouldn't have used it for evil. However, I think other physical disciplines have nearly the exact same benefits as martial arts. I get pretty much the same benefit profile from dance, yoga, and swimming. So there are things he might benefit from that won't teach him things he isn't responsible enough to control yet.

 

I don't think kids like this are lost causes. I don't think I'm a lost cause, despite my rocky past. I've dealt with a lot of the issues people think are just the end of the world: going to jail (never for a violent crime), being homeless. I've had kind of a rough life. I wasn't diagnosed with anything as a child. My mom had no help, but being a bit neurologically different herself, I think she understood me better than most people could. Sometimes she got what I needed even when it went against what everyone told her to do. I'm the one who sought out a diagnosis and medication as an adult, without anyone helping me do that. I try to understand the ways I'm different and what I need to function and be okay and be good to others. A lot of people would never even guess how messed up I am, and sometimes therapists have trouble believing my history is true because I've done so much work trying to heal myself and make myself stable. I think kids like me are often poorly understood, in part because we have a lot of trouble communicating our differences and experiences in ways others can understand. Learning to put hard concepts into words was very important for me.

 

I don't think kids like this will ever be "normal," however. There's no magic wand that makes them perfectly adapted to a school environment that wasn't designed for their needs. But I do think that their version of not-normal can be wonderful and fulfilling and not abusive or harmful to others. I think that's worth doing some unconventional things to achieve.

 

Any parents with difficult kids who resemble this feel free to ask questions. Though note that I myself don't fully understand more extreme violent/sadistic behavior like actually mutilating or killing animals, as I never did anything that extreme. I don't think that impulse comes from the same place as the stimulation-and-attention-seeking violence. I never felt tempted to kill an animal for pleasure. I think more people have heard of the sadistic animal torture/killing and get very alarmed when any violence towards animals exists. An important distinction is that kids with stimulation-and-attention-seeking violence often hit their parents and teachers. One kid I met who had this type of behavior would get into violent outbursts and hit me (an adult) a lot, but if he accidentally hit one of his peers and I said, "You hit Johnny, he's sad, apologize to him," he'd pause in his outburst, apologize to Johnny, and then go on hitting me. Kids like this hit as a "game" and for attention, but not to experience power and control. A small child hitting an adult knows they won't overpower the adult. Kids who torture or kill animals for power and control prefer helpless targets, and don't hit anything they can't overpower. They also tend to be more secretive about it. Kids with stimulation-and-attention-seeking violence are unlikely to escalate to killing an animal or younger child on purpose, though they can do it accidentally while thinking they're "playing," so they should still be supervised with anything weaker than them until they've learned to control this impulse.

 

Violent impulse control CAN be learned. A kid with impulse control issues will likely still have them crop up in other forms, and addictions later in life are a real risk. Not even necessarily to substances, because it's about compulsion and stimulation-seeking and behavioral control, things like gambling or shopping addictions can be very attractive. Learning to cope with some structure is also a good thing, because being terrible at structure does a person no favors as an adult. But it has to be at a level the kid can understand. I couldn't benefit from a lot of structure that was imposed on me because it was too much for me, I couldn't adapt. As an adult, trying to structure my life has meant a lot of very tiny baby steps that were at a level I could grasp. He's disabled when it comes to this. He can't just be thrown in the deep end of structure and expected to figure it out. What to him is just enough structure to challenge him will look like almost no structure to a normal person. But it can gradually be built up.

 

I say all that because I want to give you hope. I don't think your son is doomed to be a criminal incel school shooter.

 

I will say also that while some therapy has been useful to me, people who don't thrive in establishment settings are often poorly understood by the psychiatric establishment. Things are getting a bit better on the autism front, but a lot of the older care for autistic kids was truly dire. Minors are also treated much worse in the psychiatric healthcare system than adults. I had some horrible experiences with it in my early teens that nearly scared me off getting any kind of care at all for life. I know other people with similar problems who were driven to suicide attempts by the kind of psychiatric healthcare minors are given. It's incredibly difficult, because kids can legitimately need help, but sometimes even when appropriate help for adults exist, it doesn't exist for children. And when even experts only make the problem worse, it's easy for parents to think, "we did everything we could, he just couldn't be helped." I don't buy that. So if a therapist is helping, by all means that's great, but if he seems to get worse in therapy, that's not a coincidence.