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negativity

Mich811's picture

Stepson 7 is incredibly negative. He corrects everyone (but he's almost always wrong) and he is just generally aggressive and difficult to be around. He shouts "NO" in response to everything anyone says, and clearly thinks it is funny. He also lunges and attacks under the guise of "play", but sometimes it really hurts me!

I spent a huge chunk of this weekend alone with the skids, and I find myself really struggling for ways to get him to stop being so irritating (one of those ways involves me just handing over my iPhone so he can completely check out). It was also annoying other adults -- my mother kept saying to him, "Two year olds are negative like that, but not seven year olds." He just ignored her.

Ideas, PLEASE! I don't have kids of my own, and so I don't know how to handle them as well as I would if I'd raised him from birth.

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Mich811's picture

At first DH did nothing, but I kept pointing it out and now he is great -- he points out to SS that he is being negative, that people don't like being around negative people or always being told that they are wrong, etc. It's actually working with SS when DH is around -- but then he does it tenfold when DH is not around... and when I try that, it seems to just inspire SS to push harder, so I need to adopt a different strategy.

Mich811's picture

You know, it's so odd but this is a new thing -- he was a really sweet, adorable kid from 3 (when I met him) until 6.75! SO, we didn't have a lot of time to correct him because he really wasn't bad up until now. Argh.

The problem I'm finding is that SS is doing this when we are out, away from DH and home, so I can only threaten but not really enact punishment. DH is fine with me punishing him, but I am thinking I'd like more of a quick fix when we are out to nip it in the bud. I guess taking things away is a good start.

Can you think of anything you can say to stop them?

Mich811's picture

Oh, and I'm not usually alone with them for long periods, but this weekend we had a crisis with our house and I took the kids to dinner etc because DH had to stay home and deal with basically an exploding kitchen.