I feel like a failure.

I have a 6 year old daughter, and I cannot seem to get a handle on her behavior. At times she can be the sweetest girl, and then the other 75% of the time she is rude, sassy, and blames everyone else for the way she’s acting. If I try to correct her, if I tell her she’s not acting very nice, if I try to discipline her, she has the most epic meltdowns, screaming and crying, telling me I’m mean. She can never take responsibility for anything. I don’t spank often, I don’t like to, but occasionally if she’s really bad, she will get a swat. (Please don’t comment just to preach about not spanking kids).

Anyway, a little background. I’m a single mom, her dad and I divorced a year and a half ago, but he hasn’t lived with us in over 3 years. I work full time and my mom watches her and takes her to school. She does not really see her dad. He is court ordered to supervised visitation, and he chooses not to see her. It’s been over 8 months since the last visit.

I will be honest, I have let her have a little too much screen time, and I haven’t made the best choices of on stuff she’s watched and played. I’m trying to correct that. I’ve recently put parental controls on the devices so she is limited to 1 hour a day, and I deleted YouTube and any games that had any violence. She’s really into that stuff, so this was a HUGE deal to her. She cried like I had cut off her leg. I’m hoping over time it will get better, but the attitude I’m getting is really hard to deal with.

Another thing that I’m concerned about is that she doesn’t play well. She used to! It’s been just like the last 6 months, she is either rude to her friends, or she doesn’t want to play with them at all. She seems to not want to do anything. Today after I got off work, I wanted to get her out of the house because it’s a nice day, so we picked up her friend and went to the splash park. My daughter wouldn’t play at all. She stayed at my side whining about all the other people and what they were doing. Her friend kept asking her to play and she just refused. I felt bad for her friend and I was frustrated with her because it was something she said she wanted to do.

I don’t know where all this is coming from. We have a stable household, she doesn’t witness any fighting, violence, or attitudes.

I feel like she needs to see a counselor. What do you think? Anyone deal with this kind of behavior before?