My son is lovely - most of the time...
But he has real problems dealing with children when they infringe upon what he is doing - so when they try to come down the slide he wants to come down, when they start to climb onto the climbing frame he's on and so on. He greets them with a high pitched scream complete with clenched fists, pulls their hair, pushes them and is generally horrible. He tends to spend most of his time with little girls and has a real penchant for making them cry - this is not going to serve him well in the long-term.
I have tried paying no attention to the screaming to show that he's not getting a reaction and removing him from the thing he's playing on/with to show him that if he behaves like that then he doesn't get to play at all. I've tried to make a fuss of the other child so that he sees that the nice child is getting the attention. And my last resort is to scream back at him - and to be fair this does usually stop him at the time, but it doesn't seem to make a long-term impact.
It's worth pointing out that generally he doesn't display this behaviour when I'm at work and he's with his nanny - it's just me that has the pleasure, and this has now been going on for at least 4 months.
Any ideas? He's generally such a pleasant child that I feel embarrassed that he can be so awful. He's not like this with bigger children, like his 4/5 year old boy cousins who he worships, but the behaviour's most commonly displayed when he's with children his own age.
His language skills are OK for his age, but aren't advanced enough for us to be able to reason with him.
Any ideas - please???
Thanks in advance for your advice.