Tell your son to stop annoying his sister and then tell your daughter that her behavior is not an acceptable response when she’s annoyed. They’re both doing a wrong thing but each is doing a different wrong thing. Address each thing directly and make it clear that the real consequence of this bad behavior is your disapproval.
My daughter acts that way every once in a while, but it usually means she hasn’t had enough sleep.
My daughter (4) totally does this, and 75% of the time it means she needs something to eat. (She gets this from me. I also turn into a depressed zombie and/or emotionally explosive monster if I don’t get extremely regularly scheduled meals.)
The other 25% of the time it’s her personality – she’s a lot more inflexible and easily frustrated than I’ve seen other kids her age be. I’ve been trying to model things like “let’s see, what are some ways we can solve this” before she melts down (of course, I only get a small window of time to do this, so it involves me being kind of on top of whatever is frustrating her).
Because she is so inflexible, it also helps her a lot to have scripts for a given situation. If I’ve noticed that she gets frustrated when a friend doesn’t give her a toy that the friend is playing with – then before the friend shows up, we talk about how what she’ll do if that happens, things she could say, ways she could react, other things she could do instead of melting down. I think a lot of kids would be able to work this kind of thing out for themselves, but for whatever reason it’s very hard for her to do.
And I also try to model the negative for her, like, sometimes I’ll spill my drink or whatever and I’ll say, "Hey, maybe I will wave my arms around and say ‘Waaaaaaaah!’ At which point she’ll usually laugh and say, “No, Mommy!” Though I expect that’s more likely to work for a 4-year-old than a 7-year-old…
I’ve also read a lot of books counseling listening and identifying the child’s feelings before trying to solve the problem: “Wow, it must be frustrating that your tower fell down,” and once the child feels that her feelings are validated, only then work through what could be done to fix it. I’ve seen this work for other kids really well. My kid doesn’t care about her emotions being validated, she just wants her tower back up, so it doesn’t work for her.
With her older cousins, I’ve noticed that really consistent rules seem to help the youngest, Charles (who is 7, which is why I bring it up), from melting down when poked by his (10-year-old) older brother Cam (who knows how to wind him up). When they play games with me, no screaming is allowed and no criticizing of anyone else (which Cam would otherwise do every thirty seconds, thus priming Charles to break down and scream). When Charles saw that I was exactly as willing to call Cam out on making critical remarks as I was calling him out for screaming, he got a lot happier.
I agree with raspberry hunter. Try “scripts”, that is, having her role play appropriate ways to react to frustrating situations. No guarantee it will work, at least not right away, but she may at least get the idea that you’re trying to help her.
For whatever reason, my son responds to my mere disapproval, while my daughter does not, at least not overtly. If she’s caring about it covertly, she’s doing a good job of hiding it. 
I work with alot of children with special needs and what parents of “normal” kids have to deal with, compared to the parents with a kid in a wheelchair, who have downs syndrome, autism, deformed limbs, even cancer - I have trouble being sympathetic.
However I know that doesn’t help. Every kid has there own issues.
Just do your best, then go take a nap.
Seriously.
Ok, but in the part I quoted above, yYou seem to be saying that you can’t tell your son to stop teasing her without excusing her response and I don’t think that’s correct. My point was that verbally telling your son to knock it off doesn’t imply that your daughter’s behavior is acceptable. They are two separate events.
Don’t say, “stop making your sister upset.” Say, “stop teasing your sister” and “sister stop throwing a tantrum”, with whatever it is you need to do to get through to her that you mean it.
In what I said, I did not intend to be disagreeing with you in substance. I was just remarking on a related issue.
Oh, gotcha.
Depression in children **often **manifests as irritability rather than sadness. If this is on-going, you should have her evaluated given your family history.
Any signs she’s starting puberty?
A lot of girls are starting periods at age 9 or 10 now, and pre-period hormones start earlier than that. That can cause a lot of the emotional volatility…happy one minute, raging uncontrollably the next, and then over it, all within the span of a commercial break.
Regardless of the cause, the best thing you can do is to help her learn to manage her own behavior - isolate herself until she can regain control, and then she needs to make amends for any inappropriate behavior/language. Apologize, clean up the mess she made, and accept any consequences that her parents choose to give her.
And my sympathies entirely…it’s no fun for her, but it’s no fun for those around her either.
DEFCON 5 is puppies and rainbows, DEFCON 1 is fire and brimstone. Please take this correction with the good intentions I offer it with. It’s the kind of mistake that I hate when people let slide when I make them.
There will always**** be someone who has it worse than someone else. There is nothing wrong with being frustrated by the behavior of a healthy child just because there are kids out there with disabilities.
Sorry, but statements like that bother me a lot. Using that logic no one in the world should ever be upset about anything ever.
Frylock**** and any other parent have every right right to seek advice and vent. And just brushing things off (“do your best, then go take a nap”) can be the absolute wrong thing to do if there is** something serious going on which is causing a certain negative behavior.
Thank you for at least acknowledging this “However I know that doesn’t help. Every kid has there [sic] own issues.”
I hope everything works out with your daughter, Frylock.
Try increasing her physical exercise level.
Jogging, walking, whatever.
Yeah been there. My daughter at 4 revealed herself to be an original thinker which is rare. Her brother wondered aloud where Grandad (deceased) and our cat (same time deceased) were and she answered “they are walking in their dreams”. I still tear up when I think of that moment.
At 7 she was a toxic nuisance and refused to back down even after time out in the back porch.
Today she is 16 and likely to be Head Girl of her high school next year. She has already starred as Student of the Year twice in lower grades. I think she is channelling her late grandmother who was a refugee from Hitler’s Germany and rose to become Mayor of our city. Same determination and strength of character.
Your daughter may too have these attributes. Cherish her.
Speaking of school, what’s she like at school? Talk to her teachers from this year and last. Has her behavior there been in the “sure, she can be a pain but so can a lot of the other kids” range, or has she been the one who’s off the charts?
When the only kids you see extensively are your own, it’s hard to know where your kid’s problems really stack up. Your daughter’s teachers, OTOH, see lots of kids, and their perspective on whether you’ve got a more or less normal pain in the neck, or whether there’s something more going on, is worth getting.
I respect your comments but I do think “do your best and then go take a nap” has more credit than your giving it.
So many times we parents want to “fix” our kids. Thats why we have books that say things like “10 steps to a Happy Child” and parents start following this script of doing this, then that, then go to step 3…
Truth is every kiddo is different and what works for one kid often wont work for others. Most parents arent dumb. We know not to spoil our kids, we try to discipline them, we try to feed them well, we just plain try and do our best. I dont think it’s worth it to blame yourself because your kid isnt perfect.
So unless the kid is having some major medical issue I think all one can do is do their best. My son for example, is off the wall when he’s not on his ADD meds.
I too want the best for Frylock’s kid and it sounds to me like she’s doing all she can.
“Discussing it with him” after the fact DOES NOT have the same impact on either kid as telling him to knock it off right there in the moment. Your daughter gets the incredibly shitty experience of being poked and prodded while the person who is supposed to look out for her and have her back sits right there watching and does nothing, then gets publicly in trouble for getting upset, while any punishment he gets is private. And she knows it’s coming, because this scenario plays out again and again and again, and that knowledge almost certainly takes its own toll on her self-control. I mean, how would you feel in a situation where someone had carte blanche to be as assholish to you as they pleased and your only options were to sit there and take their shit without response, or be punished by an authority figure? How bad would that be the first time? How much worse would it be the fiftieth time?
Your son, otoh, gets the fun of poking and prodding her while you sit by, giving tacit approval by your non-interference, the fun of watching her melt down, plus he gets the fun of watching her get in trouble for responding to his goads as intended. Mission accomplished, and well worth the minor hassle of a talking-to later on. It’s pretty much all upside for him.
His reprimand needs to be as prompt and public as hers are, for everyone’s sake. She needs to learn that she can count on you to be in her corner when she’s being treated poorly, even against other family members. She also needs to know that they’re being treated equally. He needs to learn that being an asshole has no upside for him. None. No fun of baiting her, no fun of watching her blow up, no fun of seeing her get in trouble. Just trouble for himself. You need the reduced stress and tension of having fewer meltdowns. And it needn’t be anything complicated or fraught. A simple “You, stop baiting your sister. You, stop taking the bait” will probably suffice.
There’s a lot I have gestured at without describing in any detail w.r.t. my older kid kind of verbally poking at my younger kid. Probably that has led to the possibility of someone thinking I let my son “have the fun of poking and prodding her while * sit by.” Sorry about that lack of clarity but I want to take this opportunity to assure you that no event of this description occurs in my household.
Anyway, that wasn’t really something I intended to focus on. Mostly I was just wanting to describe the recent troubles with the younger one. I’ve appreciated the advice and comments on that front. Thanks.
The biggest omission on my part that probably led to that misunderstanding was this: When I said he does these things, I should have indicated that I suspect sometimes that he’s done these things, because when it happens (if I’m right that it’s happening) it happens “off stage.”
When I hear their accounts of what happened, I get the feeling he could easily have ended the situation by not insisting on something or other, and I get the feeling that getting her in trouble by getting a rise out of her was a partial motivation for his insistence, but on the other hand, it’s all speculation and surmission on my part. I generally mention that I have a strong suspicion that that is what is happening, and moreover, the negative consequences for her are tied to negative consequences for him since when she doesn’t get to watch TV for her thirty minutes that day, he misses out on that thirty minutes as well. But the reason it’s difficult for me to know exactly what to do “there on the spot” is because I don’t really know he was doing anything intentional in the way that I know she screamed and hit him. The former is a suspicion. The latter is what I can observe directly.