My boyfriend has a five year old daughter. He’s been trying really hard to get her on ADD medication... she’s extremely hyper and restless. I’ve noticed it too. But again... she’s five. To me, it seems like she’s more anxious. She’ll say her stomach hurts a lot. They did blood work and all kinds of scans, different diets... nothing. I think it’s anxiety. She freaks out if her door is closed. She’ll freak out if we get out of the car even to dump the trash into the dumpster. Basically, someone has to be in the car or around her or she has a total meltdown and bawls her eyes out! She has some behavioral issues and will deliberately not listen to my boyfriend. And she’ll smile while she does it. She’ll get into trouble and once he disciplined her, she’ll say things like “no one loves me, no one likes me” and if we ignore it she’ll scream it even louder to get our attention. If he responds it’s back to square one and she’s throwing a tantrum. She will demand things and he always has to tell her to ask again or politely. It’s like she deliberately acts this way. She’ll call out “daddy” within one minute of him leaving her room for bed, she’ll wake up crying in the middle of the night and get into bed with us, which is fine but she does it every single night. She gets so anxious. She has specific places for her toys and notices right away if something gets misplaced and freaks out. She’ll get extremely anxious if something is out of order, like if I leave my car door open for too long while I’m doing something outside, she’ll keep demanding that I shut the door and gets very weird about it. If her shoe lace is untied she’ll go nuts until it’s fixed. She gets in trouble at school all of the time for not listening. I’m a pediatric nurse and I told him I think it’s more anxiety than any sort of ADHD. But I’m starting to wonder if she actually has a mental illness and she’s just not a typical five year old. I can tell a big difference between her and her peers. Her mom lives out of state and left two years ago. She’s not a great person and I think that abandonment has a lot to do with this. I only have a ten month old so I don’t know what’s normal for a five year old at home. I see him discipline her all of the time, in a calm and patient way, and he doesn’t give into her yet she still acts like this and it’s very overwhelming for him. One time.. I was driving and she fell asleep in the back. Thirty minutes later I hear her bawling her eyes out, freaking out, and I said what’s wrong?! She said “I thought you were gone, i thought you left me.” It just breaks my heart, she seems so anxious. Does this sound normal to you?