I am hoping someone can give me a few tips how to deal with my 4yo DD. I also have a 5 week old DS and DD behaviour has become appaling. She constantly cries if asked to do something she does not want to do, does not listen and ignores when me or DH talk to her. We thought at first it was because she was being ignored, not purposely but simply because baby was taking up our time. But she is being given one on one attention from me and DH, and we do things as a foursome. It is making no difference. dD is wonderful with baby, she plays with him, sings to him etc. It's just us she seems to loathe. Before baby she never shut up, she chatted all day, played etc. Now she seems very withdrawn and will only speak when spoken too. help, I just want my daughter back.
She is also a bit under the weather and going for tests for possible amnemia etc. I am hoping this is adding to the tears as if it is simply baby I dint think I could cope with the guilt. I wanted to add to her life by giving her a sibling, not make it so horrible she withdraws into herself.
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New sibling causing bad behaviour?
Chucklecheeks · 03/01/2011 22:02
Oh dear, this was us last year, right down to the illness and tests for anaemia 
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DS1 was 4yrs 4months when ds2 was born. His world was turned upside down because I broke my ankle at 32 weeks and we never returned to "normal" before ds2 was born, but tbh, I think he would still have found it hard to adjust.
i don't really have any tips as such, but I found trying to keep things as close to normal for ds1 really helped. DS2 lived in the sling for the first few months which meant that ds1 could get almost undivided attention from me, but also for his own safety as ds1 would try to hurt him, or pull him off my boob when he was feeding, unless he was getting to nurse too (I was tandemming). I also learned to feed on the go so that there was minimum disruption to whatever we were doing.
I found sometimes, that completely unintentionally, I had let all the positive language etc slip with ds1 and seemed to be on his case a lot of the time. When I went back to praising the positive etc, his behaviour did improve, but it's hard to keep up when you are tired with a newborn.
I always felt that I was just muddling through in the early days, and tbh, I would say that things improved vastly for us at around the 4 month mark.
Good luck with it. It's bloody hard sometimes.
It's horrible isn't it. I remember feeling at times that ds2 had ruined it between ds1 and me, and other times that ds1 was ruining it between me and ds2.
I think something that possibly helped us was that ds1 had been sleeping in my bed for a couple of months before ds2 was born. This was because I couldn't get up in the night for ds1 because of my broken ankle, but when ds2 was born, it was totally the wrong time to turf him back into his own bed, so he continued to sleep with me and ds2 until ds2 was about 3 months. DS1 has always been one for needing physical contact with me and being able to snuggle up in bed seemed to help.
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