I’m so frustrated by all the aggression that Nathan has these days, with most of it directed at Toby. They sometimes play nicely together, though Nathan will often get frustrated and upset with Toby’s attempts at helping since they always result in knocking over/breaking whatever Nathan is trying to build/make. This I can understand and attempts can be made to reason with Nathan or keep Toby away.
What I don’t understand is the random displays of aggression, and I really don’t know the best way of dealing with it. These days ‘smashing’ is the thing to do. He smashes toys together, he smashes things by hitting them with his hands hard, he smashes into people by launching himself at their legs and he smashes food. Lately Nathan has started hitting Toby hard on the head, with or without a hard object in his hands.
Before the smashing became a big thing Nathan would occasionally bite us…Andrew, Toby or me. When asked why he did it, he’d say that he “just wanted to eat you”. This hitting on the head results in the same problem as the biting….a crying baby holding his arms out to be picked up and comforted, a nearly 3-year-old who runs away smiling, and an angry mother who generally picks up the baby and yells at the older child. Actually, these days I’m trying to talk to Nathan about what he’s doing to others. So the angry mother picks up the laughing boy and plonks him on the couch, telling him to stay there, and goes back for the crying baby. Of course the boy thinks it is a fun game to get off the couch and run away, so mother and baby have to catch up with him and carry him back to the couch. He doesn’t want to be there and chat about what he did to Toby, so he keeps trying to get off the couch, while the mother forcibly holds him on the couch. This results in Nathan crying and any discussion between mother and child then becomes impossible as the boy wails his distress. Today I finally got him calm enough to talk about what he did, and when asked why he hit Toby he said, with a smile, “I just wanted to smash him”.
The worst of the aggression happens after around 3 pm, so I assume that much of it is due to Nathan being tired…or at any rate it is worse because of tiredness. Still, going back to giving him afternoon naps wouldn’t help (in my opinion) because he gets much less sleep overall when he naps during the day and that just makes him almost constantly tired. That’s why we gave up his day sleeps in the first place. I’m also assuming that this is yet another stage that we just have to weather and make the best of, as far as possible.
