I have a 6yr DD. She is usually pretty well behaved but recently has been having moments where she becomes very upset and angry and will hit out whilst in her tantrum. She is usually kind and loving but it happens to be when she becomes upset over some thing and she becomes overwhelmed and angry and ends up hurting me. I think a lot of this has come from lockdown as she’s an only child and is struggling with not seeing her friends at school for so long. Before this she was usually very good with her friends with the normal type of childhood spats.
The thing is obviously we don’t accept this behaviour and always address it by explaining her hitting is not acceptable, taking away screen time etc. To calm down I have got her a sensory ball and liquid timer which does help but she has to have come out the other end of the tantrum before she’ll use these.
Anyway, for some reason DD has started doing this in response to being wound up by her friend. They have been friends since they were babies, and we get on really well with the parents and spend a lot of time together.
DF has two children and her other one is a 3 year old. As siblings they have their own little spats and I have explained to DD not to get caught in the middle of those as she can get involved and then it comes back on her.
If her friend says something to scare or upset her, rather than coming to us, she will tell her to stop and if she doesn’t she will then hit out.
We have had numerous conversations about how we don’t hit and that she needs to tell us what is happening. Another problem, is at the time she will not tell us why she has done it, and we only get one side of the story (not that it’s acceptable to hit out, but more for the context that she doesn’t do it for no reason and only with this particular friend). Because of this, she is getting a bit of a reputation for being a hitter and obviously gets the blame as she was the one that hit out rather than talking to us about something upsetting her.
Any advice on how to handle this, like I say we always reprimand her and I want her to understand that we don’t hit. We don’t smack her and would prefer to deal with the issue by talking about it but so she understands that she needs not to hit out when angry as she will loose friends. At the moment whatever we are doing doesn’t seem to have much of an affect.