Oh my god the fighting...

[ireallydontlikemonday]

Help, I feel like I'm in the middle of a daily battle zone. For the last week or so just turned 3yo DTs have been a NIGHTMARE. They are fighting over everything and anything all day. It's so draining and I'm exhausted from refereeing them, time outs, explanations and quite frankly losing my rag and shouting at them.

How do you all deal with this, calmly? Unsurprisingly they are little angels when at nursery or being looked after by

Argh stupid phone.

Being looked after by grandparents, it stars as soon as I walk in the door from work or on my days of when I'm looking after them.

Tried a reward chart but that went wrong straight away when one threw her boot at her sisters head.

I'm not quite sure what the solution is myself. I've got id DTDs who turned 3 in August and they fight on and off a lot! Generally I leave them to it unless it gets really nasty.

I have 5 year old DT sons

We have done a mixture of time outs, divide and conquer, and 1 2 1 time.

One of the best things I have set up is pom poms in a jar (could be stickers or whatever works for you). They have to both behave to get the pom poms - all or nothing - which stops them winding each other and and trying to get the other one in trouble.

The other thing when mine were little like yours was to set up the living room in two areas and set up two activities, so they could work alone and happily play without interaction. It sounds a bit joyless but actually as they didn't get a lot of alone time it helped them play quietly for a bit.

I like the Pom Pom idea super - do they get a reward if it's full or is that reward enough in itself?

We don't do 1-1 time, I think we really need to introduce it and am going to make an effort to take them out separately tomorrow.

They are ID, I wonder if they're starting to try to assert their own identities. They insist on dressing the same which means that they do get confused a bit by other people and it makes them irritated, understandably!

Degust - I try and leave them to it but it quickly escalates into one in particular biting the other

they get 5 each (it takes about a month for the jar have 20 pom poms in) which gets put into their money boxes until they want something (normally a toy)

The good thing is they can see it fill up and we count it every so often so they can see how close they are to 20

Mine fought a lot between 1 and 2.5 years old. Pushing, smacking, biting, pulling hair. It was awful. But since turning 3 it's got a lot better. She is the boss and he follows!