Parental Advice: ‘How do I stop my child from hitting his younger brother?’

This week on Parenting, a parent asked how to stop their three-year-old from hitting his siblings.

Family psychiatrist Joanna Fortune’s parenting advice this week was to change your approach when talking to a child who is being aggressive.

“In the past few months, he has started pushing, hitting and hurting my three-year-old son,” she said. Moncrieff.

“We’ve tried everything: talking to him and telling him why it’s not okay, giving rewards for removing toys if he doesn’t stop. This doesn’t seem like an appropriate or long-term solution.

“I can see that everything he is doing is to get our attention, but I can’t understand it because we give him so much of our time.

“We are in this trend of him constantly cheating, I don’t like it. We are tired of the repetitive behavior and are losing patience with the whole situation and it is causing some fights between me and my husband too.

“I also wonder how he must be feeling as if we are all against him, always giving up and correcting him.

“He can often be a lovely kind boy. He sometimes likes to help me with the housework or change his brother’s nappies and can be really nice to him sometimes, but this is usually short-lived.”

Family psychotherapist Joanna Fortune said that the emotion that parents read on their child’s face is probably the intensity of emotion felt at the time, rather than an expression of their desire to hurt someone.

He stressed the importance of trying new methods to address a child’s behavior.

“You’ve tried a lot. You’ve tried behavior modification things that rely on an understanding of cause and effect thinking.

“I really feel they are ineffective because developmentally he is too small to be anything other than ineffective.

“Then I’d stop doing that. They’ll drive you crazy.”

Parental Advice: Changing Attitudes

Joanna Fortune argued that at age three, the child probably does not have the emotional vocabulary or fluency to express what he or she is feeling underlying this behavior.

She said setting limits with a young child is very different from setting limits with an older child and recommended using short sentences to address them.

The child is angry. Image by: Alamy Stock.

“Say it in short words,” he said.

“Then redirection and distraction. Instead of always making a list of ‘don’t do, don’t do, stop doing’, it adds to what needs to be done.

“So if you’re saying ‘No, no hitting, hug your brother, give your brother a high five, hug everyone together in the group, and you redirect him into something, bring him to a block building or his trains or his dino or whatever he likes to play with, set him up with that, sit with him for a minute or two and get him started.

“So it’s okay to let him see that you are consoling the one who is hurting rather than the one who is being hurt.

“It seems like there’s a lot of frustration, energy and impulse packed into his little body.

“Get him out of moving, jumping, crashing, schooling, all these things to help him do some things.”

Ms Fortune said this phase was likely to pass but if it did not the problem should be addressed.

Main image: Children playing on the floor with toys in the crèche. Image by: Alamy.