Interesting points you bring up about the family life of this little 3 year old. As young as I can remember, I pushed away my parents & didn't want to touch or hold their hand....my reasoning as I recall was that I didn't want anyone to know they were my parents. Something about them embarrassed me about them.....but at that age, I had NO IDEA what in the world that was or even why or what thought had come to my mind that made me feel that way. I just knew that I was different around other adults than I was around my parents. They made me think it was me that had the problem.....it's only been in the last several years (I am now 63) that I realized just how dysfunctional my parents actually were. I didn't tell stories or anything for attention. Being an only child, I was used to entertaining myself so getting attention wasn't something that was natural for me either.

The thing is that if her mom is dysfunctional for whatever reason, there isn't much that can be done about it. The only thing you can do is to give the child attention while calling her on any untruths she thinks is needed to get attention & to call her on lies that YOU have actually seen the truth about so that she knows she can't get away with it.

Sadly, parents are what they are & kids grow up learning whatever skills they create along the way to make up for parents dysfunctions. Shoot, I worked so hard at NOT being like my parents but having no good guide for another way, I created my own dysfunctional way of caring for my own daughter. It was basically a 180 different way of being dysfunctional, but dysfunctional in it's own way.

Being a parent is never easy especially if you haven't had a good example growing up. Only thing is that sometimes outside people do make the difference whether it's branded as making their kid more disrespectful of not.....just interface with the 3 year old the way that feels natural to you.