Feel like I’m constantly moaning about my DD on here but what is mumsnet for if it isn’t for this!
Since our DS arrived 6 weeks ago our usual funny, happy, challenging but nothing to shout about daughter has become a violent, angry child and I feel like I’ve read every article and blog about dealing with challenging behaviour with pre schoolers and tried every tactic but nothing is working. We’ve had probably our worst day on record today, to give some examples -
- Tried to put a towel over babies face multiple times, told her to stop or she goes to her room, she doesn’t stop so have to drag her kicking and screaming to her room
- Due to ongoing horrendous behaviour I’d been using the threat that she’s not going to the fun fair we had planned to go to today if she doesn’t behave, she hasn’t behaved so I told her we couldn’t go. Obviously resulted in a huge tantrum, about 45 mins long, knocked over all the chairs in the kitchen, swore at me (a new thing she’s picked up from nursery), chased me into the living room and scratched me to the point that I bled.
- Didn’t want her lunch so picked up the play sand and put it all over the sofa with some general screaming to go with it
- Completely out the blue after us playing nicely for a good 2 hours walks over to DS sleeping in his cot and scratches his face.
We try SO hard to make her feel loved and included, for example her dad took her bowling and out for lunch yesterday and she came home and was an absolute terror and today I played with her solidly for 4 hours and as soon as I stopped the bad behaviour starts. This MUST be something that’s led from the arrival of DS as she’s never ever been like this; especially not violent. She’s started saying she hates me which really hurts and at every opportunity she’ll try and do sly things to hurt the baby. Ie, she’ll always act like she’s being kind, like she’ll approach the baby and say “oh I just love him” but then squeeze him REALLY hard and not let go trying to hurt him, it’s got to the point where I fear her going near him as I don’t trust what she’ll do.
PLEASE tell me this is just a phase, and if so what on earth are we meant to do to get through this. We’ve tried giving her all of our attention which doesn’t work as when it stops she kicks off. We’ve tried really disciplining her but she just gets 10x worse and we end up having to lock her in her room whilst she goes mental which just feels cruel. We’ve tried including her with the baby but she just tries to hurt him at every opportunity and we’ve tried to cut her some slack and give her so much love and affection and all that stuff but she still treats us with no respect and genuinely like she hates us.
Is my child broken or is this normal 😭