4 year old just won’t stop
Looking for lots of advice for a particular behaviour of my 4.5 year old son’s. He’s a great kid, kind, helpful, always tries to do the right thing, except when it comes to his almost 3 year old sister.
My 3 year old is mature for her age, she’s a great playmate and socially aware and most of the time they get along great. They are each others best friends and always eager to play together rather than on their own but often it devolves into my 4year old doing something physical to his sister and seeming unable to stop.
He’ll grab her, tickle her, step on her, push her around with his head and she’ll be using her words like we taught her, “stop” “please stop” “no thank you” “I don’t like that” and it gets to the point where she’s just begging and crying and screaming for him to stop and he just won’t. 90% of the time a me or my husband needs to intervene and literally pull him off her, and then he’s still lunging and fighting to get back to her and continue what he was doing. He just won’t snap out of it. They play together all day long and I also have a baby so sometimes it takes a minute to step in and this is happening dozens of times a day.
I’ve noticed it’s worse later in the day when they’re tired and it’s worse when he’s hungry but he’s always well fed and eats like a horse. It’s also gotten worse since his preschool has gotten out and they are together all day every day.
We’ve tried a lot of things but my most effective consequences will end up punishing the 3 year old as well, such as “when you don’t listen to her words we have to leave” if we’re at a park or something. Writing this I realize I should make him sit out, rather than pack everyone up to go home. I will try that but it’s hard to enforce without physically making him take a break, because the consequence for him not sitting out would be leaving which is again, punishing the 3 year old as well.
At home we are consistent with pulling him off and having him sit on the stairs to “take a break” (timeout) but it’s been months of this.
Part of our routine is while I’m putting the baby down for a nap, they play downstairs together for 20 minutes then they can watch a show. When he doesn’t listen to her words which usually happens, I separate them and tell him “you didn’t listen to her words, she doesn’t want to play with you anymore, find something else to do” which seems like the natural consequence. Also, she wants to play with him, so if I’m available I enforce the rule that he has to say sorry and ask if he can play with her, and she will always say yes.
I don’t know, I’m at the end of my rope and feel like I should be able to handle this. He doesn’t behave this way with anyone else and was a model student at preschool. His behaviour seems to border on bullying/abusive because he hurts her and she will be screaming “stop, please stop” and he just can’t hear her. It triggers me and it’s making me want to dip into parenting practices that I don’t agree with like yelling or shaming because I feel so powerless.