My 4 year old screams at his 9month old baby brother

[Defeatedmam]

During my pregnancy we didn't hide anything from my toddler. Kept him in the loop explained any questions he had. He knew he was having a baby brother. Since the baby has started scrawling around and standing my 4 year old just screams at him whenever he gets too close. He takes away the babies toys, but won't share his own and will have a tantrum about it. It's getting to the point where you can't do anything with the baby if the 4 year old is around because he'll just scream. Any one else gone through something like this and how did you get out of the trenches

My DD was like this, really highly strung and controlling (she still is really).
Try to give them both 1 to 1 time, allow him to have precious things in his room so baby can't touch them, and explain anything in communal areas is fair game. Try to get him involved in nice games etc wIth baby so he can see the baby isn't just a massive PITA, loads of praise if he plays nicely etc.
But some kids are just like this, and are meant to be only children really 🙄

I had a feeling he would be like this because we spent so much time just us. He has no cousins and hasn't really been around younger kids all his life until now. Just didn't realise it would be this hard. Luckily we've nipt it in the bud about being physical with the baby because he did start pushing him down when the baby would get into his space but now with the screaming...and now the summer holidays have kicked off their both in each others space 🙃

Mine is a little bit like this - we have a smaller age gap but DS1 is 4 and DS2 is 1 and a half. The problem isn't quite so acute though as they're both at nursery where they go into separate rooms, so we're not having to constantly adjudicate! What we tend to do at home though is have them quite separate most of the time. 4yo has all his colouring and toys with small parts like lego on a high table where the little one can't reach, so he can do that without 'help' from his brother. The little one has an area where most of his toys and books are in the sitting room so he's often pottering around there. Over the last few months they've started voluntarily playing together a bit more, maybe for up to half an hour at a time, but it wasn't until DS2 was a fair bit older than your baby that he became interesting enough to the 4yo. And we do sometimes still get screams of 'MUM!!! DS2 is trying to cuddle me and I don't WANT a cuddle!' I think it's partly that the little one isn't very good at being gentle yet.

With toys, we try and enforce the same rules as they have at nursery: if you're playing with something, it's your turn until you've finished. So we'll stop DS2 taking DS1's toys if he's playing with them at the time, and vice versa. DS1 knows that if he doesn't want DS2 to play with his toys, he has to put them on the high table or in his room, and not in the downstairs rooms where the 'everybody toys' go.

Imo the difficulty for the firstborn in adapting to having a sibling often increases at this point. The younger one is more of a 'threat' because they can move and try to take toys etc, whereas before they're mobile they're just sort of there in the background.
Obviously shouting and pushing are not OK. Maybe making sure there is space for your oldest to play with his toys without younger one being able to get to them? Saying wow you must be mad to shout like that. We can be angry without shouting. You could take deep breaths/ clench your fist/punch a pillow whatever you think. He needs to know what behaviours to replace it with

If you could nip the physical stuff in the bud why not the rest? Can you not use the same/a similar technique?

I’m sorry you’re going through this - it sounds very hard. I worried my older boy would be like this as there was a 5 year gap but he’s always been uncharacteristically patient with his little brother. I have no tips and I think it’s completely accidental.