Reply to 3 year old son constantly hurts little brother

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Reply to "3 year old son constantly hurts little brother"

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[quote=Anonymous]I'm a pretty gentle/consensual parent, and a pretty gentle/consensual special ed teacher of kids with emotional issues.

The first thing I'll tell you is that it is unnatural to expect a parent not to react when their child is hurt.  Kids need to see that people have real emotions, and they need to see normal healthy emotional responses, and ignoring your child's injuries is not that.  In addition, most of us have a point where we can't ignore (too close to the stairs?  a broken bone?) and you don't want the 3 year old to be searching for that point.

So, if you're concerned that attention is part of the reinforcer, you need to respond in a way that doesn't feed the behavior with attention, which is most easily done by turning your attention to the victim.  Come in, scoop up your crying child, take him in the next room and cuddle him and love on him.  Leave your other kid standing there watching his brother get all the attention. If your other kid follows you let him watch, but if he tries to climb on your lap or whatever tell him right now you need to take care of the baby who was hurt.   Basically, you're giving a time out, in that you're withdrawing attention, but you're doing it in a logical way.

Then, after the baby is calmed down, and settled into a play activity, call you older child over and calmly (you should be calmed down by this point), and say "You hit your brother.  That is not OK.  We do not hit in this family."

Then, on top of it, think about what you do want your son to do instead, and explicitly teach that.  "I notice you like to push.  Let me show you how you CAN push.  You can push on the wall like this."  And when you catch him about to start cue him "remember the wall!"  When he remembers, reinforce like crazy.  "What a big boy!  Great job!"

If those things don't work, then I'd think of adding another layer of consequence, either something he likes (e.g. a sticker towards earning a special activity) for NOT hitting, or losing something for doing it.  I wouldn't do a traditional time out at this point, because usually there is a lot of attention involved in teaching the skill of going to time out, and in the moment it sounds like you're too emotional to be able to teach it without it being reinforcing.  So, I'd take something away instead, since that's not a consequence that needs your son's cooperation.  [/quote]

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