3 year old insanely jealous of little brother- help

[Chattycat78]

Just that really. Have a 3.5 year old and a 2 year old. 2 year old is good natured and chilled. 3.5 year old is ridiculously demanding/ won’t olay alone, demands constant attention from morning til night and has been like this since birth.

This is not the problem in question though. He is insanely jealous of the 2 year old. He spends all of his time up in his face, following him around, disrupting his play and generally making a pain in the ass of himself. This also includes trying to trip him up, push him over and generally do nasty things to him the moment your back is turned so we have to constantly police their interaction, it’s exhausting.

We’ve tried telling him off, sending him to his room, threatening he can’t attend parties etc; nothing so far has worked.

We’ve just come back from a “holiday” abroad where we basically spent the whole week dealing with this 24/7 and we’ve come back needing another holiday!

Anyone else experienced this? If so- what’s the solution?

3.5 year old is ridiculously demanding/ won’t olay alone, demands constant attention from morning til night and has been like this since birth

TBH, it sounds as though you almost don't like your elder son - maybe he picks up on you finding the 2nd child so much easier, and is demanding & jealous because of this. I feel a bit sorry for your elder boy, tbh, you obviously find him difficult, so he's becoming what you expect him to be.

Maybe if you could do something about accepting DS1 as he is, he wouldn't try to constantly try to test you to see if you care about him (which is one way of looking at the sibling rivalry). If you find your DS2 much easier & more pleasant, then it's quite reasonable your DS1 is jealous.

Might be worth a think about your interactions with DS1.

I done get that at all - it must be tiring having a demanding child and if he is doing out of his way to pick on a younger sibling then it must be exhausting (no, not all siblings play nicely with each other).

Sometimes older siblings are horrible because they have never been at he receiving end of petty nastiness and torment from an older sibling.

Does the older one dlgo to nursery?

Wandering- I take your point, but it’s only because of his recent treatment of his little brother that we’re struggling to “like” him, and I wrote this post last night when I was cross with him so it might come across this way, so I’m afraid that I don’t agree with what you say that we “just don’t like him”- in fact it’s fairly offensive to be honest.

Yes he goes to Nursery when I work 2 days a week.