My 3 yo has found it hard since second child appeared (now 7m). Her behaviour is quite attention seeking, like being as noisy as possible, has to be first in the car/bath/up the stairs etc; she’s highly emotional over small things, like getting water on her top and has to have whatever anyone else has (steals the baby’s weaning food/toy. She also has a horrible attitude a lot of the time, like will try and push me off the sofa if I’m sat in ‘her’ seat. She will try and get into trouble by hitting us, we did a lot of time out for this which has slightly resolved. Then if I try to spend more time with her, like let’s go for a walk, she doesn’t want to go anywhere, or doesn’t want to play. It always has to be me to get her out the car or bed or she’ll just scream at her dad.
She goes to nursery 4 days a week where she’s very happy and has no issues. However, she is also wired after nursery and takes forever to go to sleep. I can’t help but feel that she’s clearly not happy in some way at home but I don’t know what else to do. She gets so many cuddles, and when the baby is asleep I will try and do something fun with her so she gets time with just me. Her dad also will spend a lot of time playing with her by herself. We go out to places, she gets more freedom to do activities at home than we ever had even if they make a mess. But she’s still like a bomb waiting to go off at home sometimes and it’s getting harder to not end up shouting/screaming at her.
We have very little time to spend more with her; I’m on mat leave, husband has very busy job and is doing a part time degree on top of that. Family live hundreds of miles away and friends have their own lives so we have no one who could/would help. I don’t even have anyone to talk to about it. What else can I do to improve things? It’s making me feel completely inadequate and down, I want to avoid psychologically damaging her as I was but I’m clearly doing something wrong. Or maybe we’re making her too much of a focus and the baby will end up with no attention and then she’ll be the damaged one?! Not sure I can get it right whatever I do.