When my oldest was two years old and I was pregnant, a friend with three kids under age five informed me she was taking my kid home so I could sleep.
She didn't ASK. She TOLD me he was going home with her.
I was EXHAUSTED. I didn't argue it. I slept until noon and got about twelve hours of sleep that night. The whole rest of my pregnancy was easier because of it.
I was short of sleep the first 7 years of his life and I didn't have a paid job. I was a full-time mom.
When my sister came to visit me and her child was an infant, the last night there her baby was not going to sleep. I'm good at getting kids to sleep and also had experience with a baby with respiratory issues. I soon realized breathing issues were keeping her awake.
I told my sister "She can't sleep because she can't breathe. You're flying back tomorrow. We could spend your last night in Urgent Care or I could feed her cola so the caffeine opens up her lungs."
She opted for the caffeine route and about an hour later her baby could breathe but was hopped up on caffeine and metaphorically climbing the walls and literally climbing all over mom. After a few minutes, my sister looked at me and deadpan said "Your oldest was like this all the time as a baby (because he was on prescription medication) and you didn't kill yourself?"
I died laughing.
When I was homeschooling, my long-distance best friend was a former nurse running a business selling educational materials for twice exceptional kids, so she was effectively a professional in the field of dealing with kids like mine and she politely characterized my kids as "challenging."
My first parenting site was called Kids Like Mine because I routinely used that phrase when talking with parents online whose children had formal diagnoses of various sorts, like ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) or ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder) or OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder), and anecdotally saying "Well, my kid doesn't have a diagnosis but does have traits like that, and X, Y and Z work with kids like mine."
My oldest was 19 or 20 when he casually mentioned that he knew he was recovering from some health hiccup "because I can no longer taste colors." So then I asked around online for synesthesia resources to more effectively cope with a kid I used to describe as an enigma wrapped in a mystery concealed in shadows, revealing nothing and about whom new potentially way out there issues were still being uncovered.
My oldest most likely qualifies for an ASD diagnosis and I have repeatedly spoken with people with professional qualifications who assume he has such a diagnosis. When my sister went to the Gifted Development Center in Denver, Colorado for assessment for her child, staff commented that the description in the family profile of my son sounded ASD.
I never got him formally assessed because I pulled him out of school and we homeschooled, so I didn't need a formal diagnosis from licensed professionals to fill out an IEP (Individual Education Plan). I could just accommodate his issues because I'm his mom and I love him and I like being nice and it worked to make reasonable accommodation for his many quirks.
He also has a diagnosis of atypical cystic fibrosis (CF). I've talked with parents or read articles about children with either ASD or CF who required hospitalization for inpatient treatment for eating disorders to force them to learn to take sustenance orally.
My son has two issues that can result in being hospitalized to make you learn to eat and he has a healthy relationship to food and never did have big issues with eating. To this day, if he says "Get me popcorn. I can't stomach other salty snacks right now." I get him popcorn and let him eat healthy stuff he's capable of stomaching and I don't make a big deal of it.
In his thirties, he stopped being rail thin and developed a small pot belly. So he looks like a normal healthy person, not like a refugee from a concentration camp like most people with CF.
There is substantial anecdotal evidence that my kids were much more of a handful than average. One friend with professional qualifications informed me "Kids like yours routinely get beaten by their parents who don't know how to cope with them."
When my oldest was in his twenties, he began routinely telling me "You're an awesome mom and I'm so glad you raised me!" I would ask "Why are you saying that?" and he would tell me about something he read or some conversation he had online.
He was realizing other kids with his problems usually don't get the kind of support he got. The adults in their lives routinely make it into a bigger problem instead of getting them the help they need.
People online routinely tell me to my face I'm a liar about things I think are much more modest than doing right by my difficult kids, so I'm reluctant to spell it out. It seems to do nothing for my credibility and gets me accused of being a drama queen, making stuff up.
People on Metafilter implicitly called me a liar for saying a Fortune 500 company hired me at better than minimum wage as my first full-time job in my forties and that seems extremely tame compared to my parenting accomplishments.
But if your kid is a giant pain the butt, there's probably things you could be doing to handle it better. And this blog may help more than most paid professionals who sometimes give actively bad advice like "Loom over and threaten your violent child when he's young."
Rest assured, if you teach a small child that violence and threatening people is FINE if you are bigger than them, you will regret that when they get older and probably taller than you.