Teenage son wound up about his younger brother playing with (and breaking) his old toys. What rules do you suggest?

[tigermoth]

My nearly 13 year old has lots of toys he never plays with - star wars figures, beyblades, that sort of thing, plus xbox games he is now bored with.

My 7 year old son often digs them out and starts playing with them. He is fairly careful but inevitably things break, get lost or saved xbox scores get erased and so on.

Teenage son gets cross and really spiteful towards 7 year old. It is a real ignition point and leads to fights. Teenage son refuses to let 7 year old near his stuff, and IMO can be unreasonable about sharing as said stuff is of zero interest to him. But I cannot deny that it is his stuff and I feel it can be heavy handed of me to insist ds1 shares it.

Ds2 understandaly gets upset that there are these interesting toys lying around gathering dust, toys designed for his age group, not teenagers, yet he is banned from touching them.

I don't know where to draw the boundaries. I really don't want to have to buy duplicates of toys for ds2 when ds1 has a perfectly good example of said toy that is no longer used by him. Too expensive and too much clutter.

I never had this problem as a child as I had no sisters and brothers.

Anyone help with fair ground rules?

You are SO the youngest, Harpsi

It's not about toys, it's about TERRITORY

We have this problem in reverse - DD (9) has a Nintendo DS Lite, and DS (13) is always wanting to play with it. DD gets really mad, sulky, upset. The she says "OK you can have it forever" - I see now it is just a territorial battle.

It's an odd one. Our 3 (10, 8 and 4) have a huuuge reservoir of toys that are common to all of them. Books, teddies, games, lego, dolls house, Playmobil etc. But some are sacrosanct. It's not always easy to tell which ones will be either. I don;t think it's unreasonable for the older one to want to keep something to himself - perhaps it's just his way of hanging on to part of his childhood when his younger sibling wasn't around - keeping part of himself seperate. Or as others have put it 'territory'. Could you ask the older one to find some of his things that he doesn't want anymore and would be prepared to 'sell' - perhaps for some of his younger brother's pocket money or for something else that he wants.

It would give him the message that you/DS#2 respect his boundaries and feelings.

I think you are very right about territory and the oldest one wanting to cling on to some of his childhood toys. It's natural, of co9urse, for ds1 to have special toys.

I had a major declutter of their bedroom on sunday. Threw binloads of rubbish away and my car boot is full of stuff for the charity shop. Both boys seem really happy that their room is more orderly and the remaining toys are easier to get at. It's definitely taken some of the stress away. I have also given each son some special storage boxes - theirs alone - to keep special non-sharing toys in.

I will see how this goes. I am very conscious that ds1 has more expensive toys than ds2, as well as cricket and fishing gear, a CD player, mobile phone, mp3 player etc. So I am reluctant to 'reward' ds1 too much when he lets ds2 have his old toys. A nominal amount is fine, but ds2 will never be able to sell on his old toys to a sibling, as we don't have any more children.

At least we have two x boxes now, one for ds1 and one for dw2, in different rooms, so each can play their own games.