Just a little background information we’re both women and we have two daughters and this incident is about our youngest daughter. Sorry this will probably be long I just need to rant and I need advice.Anyways the pandemic has obviously made everything more stressful and I think it has really negatively impacted our children especially our youngest daughter. She’s always been our headstrong and sometimes difficult kid and being stuck inside and not being able to do the usual has really made things challenging. Our daughter has displayed some worrying behaviors over the past 3 months (basically since online school started). She has been throwing full blown tantrums, hitting her sister, being mean and yelling at us, refusing to do what she’s asked, and many other things.We as parents heavily believe in positive reinforcement and talking out our feelings. Our parenting techniques have basically been letting our children sit in time out to calm down when things are heated and then discussing our feelings when we’re all calm and coming to solutions about our behavior and it’s worked pretty well. Our daughter however has basically decided she doesn’t care about time out anymore or talking about feelings. Well put her in time out when things are heated and she’ll immediately leave or kick and scream if she’s put back. I believe the weight of how things have changed is really starting to hit her. Before the pandemic she had music lessons, gymnastics, and frequently visited her friends and family. We traveled and got out of the house all of the time and now we’re mainly stuck inside unless we do socially distanced outdoor activities. Also another issue that I think has influenced this behavior the most is that we have our kids in a nanny share with a few of our neighbors to do online learning and socialize. Our neighbors daughter is the same age as mine and she exhibits a lot of these behaviors as well. My daughter has become close friends with her and I think she’s copying these behaviors she sees her friend doing. Her friend will hit and yell at her mother to get her way and our daughter since starting the nanny share has started to do the same.My wife grew up in a very abusive childhood where she basically got beaten if she did anything wrong (much worse happened to her too if I’m being honest). However she’s been in therapy since before we met and I’ve always known her to be a happy healthy well adjusted person. We have a great relationship and she’s been wonderful with our kids. I’d actually say she’s much better at keeping her patience with our kids than I am and is usually the one to take over when I’m getting frustrated with them. I’ve always admired her ability to remain calm even when it seems like our house is exploding.Yesterday was our oldest daughters birthday and our youngest daughter was not having it. Normally on the kids birthdays we take the siblings out for the day and let the birthday kid have their time with family and friends without having to deal with their sibling being upset at the lack of attention. We can’t do this now obviously. Our youngest daughter was ANGRY that her sister was getting toys and presents and that she got to decide what we ate for dinner and how the cake was decorated etc. Pretty much the entire ordeal had her big mad. I’d say for 8 hours straight my wife and I were putting her in the calm down corner, explaining why she can’t yell/hit/pull her sisters hair, and trying our best to not ruin our oldests birthday while dealing with all of this.The big present we got our oldest was an iPad (we heavily limit screen time for the younger kids and they have never had tablets before). Our younger daughter immediately tried taking the iPad away and wanted to use it. My wife explained to her over and over that it wasn’t hers and she can’t use it. Well an hour or so after our oldest daughter opened her presents and got the iPad her and her sister got in a fight over the iPad because our youngest tried to take it. They were chasing each other around the house screaming for it and our youngest daughter ended up throwing the iPad across the room and shattered the screen. Our oldest daughter was devastated obviously. I was already over the whole situation and so upset so I didn’t even try to talk to my youngest daughter and was just comforting the oldest.My wife (still calm at this moment) was dealing with our youngest and basically trying to take her to calm down and deal with this once the emotions were down. Our youngest had a full blown temper tantrum when my wife tried to take her to her room and started hitting her and then spit right in my wife’s face. In that moment I saw a side of my wife I’ve never seen before. She yanked our daughter over her knee pulled down her pants and spanked her extremely hard as our daughter screamed and cried (she’s never been hit before so I doubt she had any idea what was going on). Then she pulled my daughter up and screamed right in her face that she was “so f*cking tired of her behavior and she better straighten up right now because she will never act like this again if she knows what’s good for her”. My wife stormed out of the living room and up to our room after. Both of our daughters were stunned because mommy has never acted like that before and our youngest was very very upset but surprisingly quiet.We’ve lightly discussed the situation and she said she knew she shouldn’t have hit her but she said something had to be done about our daughter and she didn’t see any other way to handle her. I’m at a loss on what to do. via /r/Parenting https://ift.tt/3oj7fCE
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