How to handle this without losing my shit?

[recreationalcalpol]

DS will be 3 in September, and I have an 8 week old DD. DS has been pretty good with the new baby, but quite often toddler exuberance gets the better of him and he’ll run up and grab her hard, or he’ll jump/kick around near her head while she’s having her nappy changed, or throw a toy at her or something like that. General reckless toddler behaviour and he obviously doesn’t really understand that he could hurt or has hurt the baby. He’s just now come up and grabbed her leg hard in the spot where she’s had her vaccinations today . Obviously he doesn’t understand about the injection pain, but grabbing her still isn’t on.

I just can’t get him to listen to me about being gentle or he forgets about the need to do so. I’m alone with both of them most of the time, and I often can’t physically stop him as I’ll be feeding or bathing the baby or in the middle of changing a nappy. It doesn’t help that DD is really not keen on being put down so I’m not often hands-free.

Those that have been there before, what worked for you? I find it really difficult not to shout when he hurts DD but I don’t want to be a shouty mum and it doesn’t work anyway. He’s pretty good at saying sorry to DD afterwards, but I would rather that he just didn’t do it!

Any tips? I’ve started reading How to Talk so Kids Will Listen and have found it useful, but I’m not sure how to deal most effectively with bad behaviour when there is an immediate risk of harm to his sister.

Any tips gratefully received!

He’s so young, all you can do is keep calmly correcting. If you’d are thrown they can be confiscated.

Sorry that should say toys can be confiscated if thrown.

Ahh it's hard when those protective instincts kick in in both directions!

Things that helped here were
-always refer to baby as "your little brother/sister"
-show photos of older child as a baby getting all the things current baby does
-say the thing you want "gentle hands" not the thing you don't "don't hit" (something about small children reacting to verbs more than the whole phrase)
-chat with them about how they might be feeling resentful/frustrated by the baby, encouraging some play with bears/dolls (we're a bear house ) to act things out can help the conversation.

I feel for you. My three year old is pretty, um, physical and I’m sure he’d be exactly the same if there was a newborn in the picture.

Have you got the little kids version of ‘how to talk…’? That’s got the stuff for very little kids (though I think they have to be very switched on to get some of it).

Some of the things I tried with DD was to give her lots of praise when she was being gentle, so she knew what I was looking for. I also reduced opportunity as far as possible. So in your case, I think I’d have newborn in the sling as much as you can.

One to one time with him will be really important but you know that.

And something that weirdly helped my older one with new sibling struggles was learning how to scoot! It sort of gave her a new interest and something that was just hers, away from the new baby.

I hope some of this is helpful, it’s hard getting used to 2.

Keep repeating,be gentle and take away any thrown toys. Change dd where ds isn't able to kick her. Basically keep her out of his way until she can defend herself which won't be long

Thanks all! I’ll start taking toys away and open some gin work on my calming breathing exercises

Thrown toys that should say, rather than just arbitrarily removing them