Have a Nice Day!

My two oldest kids are very competitive. As a result (I *think*), the oldest one (boy) is constantly antagonigzing the middle one (girl). He is 3 1/2 years older than she is.

Many times he will just pick at her for no reason and it appears very compulsive to me. It includes hitting, poking, pinching, kicking, snapping with rubber bands, etc. Once he refused to get out of the doorway of her room, even after she told him to leave several times. She finally slammed the door and it got his fingers. He carried on as if he had no responsibility in it. And many times if she is discussing something with me (that doesn't even concern him), he butts in from another room and mocks her.

For the moment, I have him in his room until he can be with us without antagonizing or stalking her. He thinks I'm being unfair.

Any suggestions?

Kristen



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Today is even more important than tomorrow because "today" is a gift, and "tomorrow" might never come.

Today is where hope lives because today is when we can make things better than yesterday.

The only thing we can be sure of is today and life isn't worth living if it isn't lived in joy for as many moments of today as we can manage.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Have a Nice Day!

I should have added that I have tried having polite conversations with him about this and I've tried asking him to stop and it just doesn't work.

He likes the reaction he gets.

Kristen
----- Original Message -----
From: Have a Nice Day!
To: [email protected]
Sent: Tuesday, March 04, 2003 9:43 PM
Subject: [Unschooling-dotcom] Sibling Competition


My two oldest kids are very competitive. As a result (I *think*), the oldest one (boy) is constantly antagonigzing the middle one (girl). He is 3 1/2 years older than she is.

Many times he will just pick at her for no reason and it appears very compulsive to me. It includes hitting, poking, pinching, kicking, snapping with rubber bands, etc. Once he refused to get out of the doorway of her room, even after she told him to leave several times. She finally slammed the door and it got his fingers. He carried on as if he had no responsibility in it. And many times if she is discussing something with me (that doesn't even concern him), he butts in from another room and mocks her.

For the moment, I have him in his room until he can be with us without antagonizing or stalking her. He thinks I'm being unfair.

Any suggestions?

Kristen



****************************************************************

Today is even more important than tomorrow because "today" is a gift, and "tomorrow" might never come.

Today is where hope lives because today is when we can make things better than yesterday.

The only thing we can be sure of is today and life isn't worth living if it isn't lived in joy for as many moments of today as we can manage.


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]


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[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

the_clevengers

--- In [email protected], Have a Nice Day!
<litlrooh@c...> wrote:
> I should have added that I have tried having polite conversations
with him about this and I've tried asking him to stop and it just
doesn't work.
>
> He likes the reaction he gets.

One thing that sometimes works here is that if one of the kids is
pestering the other, I'll say "It sounds like you really want your
brother's attention. You can tell him 'I want your attention' or 'I
want to play with you'". I think sometimes they (and often we, as
adults) do things to get other people's attention, without
neecessarily being aware that we're doing so, so it can help to hear
that there's another way to go about it.

OTOH, sometimes it seems that they're both enjoying just pestering
the heck out of each other. If no one is in imminent danger of death
or dismemberment, I might choose not to say anything. Unless of
course the noise level is getting beyond my threshold as well.

I think with this, as with so many parenting issues, there's
no "quick fix". We can model polite interactions with others (and
that's the hard one, isn't it - of course we never bicker with our
spouses, right? :-), and we can help them learn other ways of
communicating, and most likely over time they will change their
methods of interaction.

Blue Skies,
-Robin-

Tia Leschke

> I should have added that I have tried having polite conversations with him
about this and I've tried asking him to stop and it just doesn't work.
>
> He likes the reaction he gets.

If it really is because of the reaction he gets, you might help your
daughter figure out some possible different reactions, maybe something funny
or surprising, that would change the mood. My son got his grandma to stop
nagging and nattering at him by putting his finger to his lips in a very
exagerated way and saying "shhhhh". It totally threw her off her stride,
made her laugh, and she stopped doing it after a few times.
Tia