When the pandemic and lockdown hit, William my eldest (now almost 13) was in year 6, his final year in primary school. In that final year they have lots of fun things planned towards the end of the year: an inflatables fun course in the school field, the end-of-year prom, and an activity holiday 3 nights away trip. All those things had to be canceled of course like many others that year. We moved on since then, but now my daughter Phoebe is in year 6 and she is getting all the things he missed out on.
William gets jealous a lot, if he feels the others are getting more attention than him or they’ve had money spent on them that he feels is out of proportion he keeps tabs. It’s exhausting trying to make sure everything is ‘fair.’ It ends up he does take up a lot of attention! Daniel our youngest does need slightly more attention because he’s younger, but we always try to make it fair. I suspect he has difficulty regulating his emotions due to his autism and ADHD.
Phoebe had a friend round this weekend and the friend’s mother had given her sweets and chocolate to share with Phoebe. This sent William’s jealousy into overdrive, he wanted the exact same, I was trying to give him similar, and I made sure some of it was shared, but I was trying to explain that sometimes he would get other things that she wouldn’t (I’ve talked about this before to him) and that he can be happy for them this time and not always check what other people are getting. Daniel the youngest (he’s 7) is OK with the same things, he wanted some chocolate but was happy with a few M&Ms which was easily rectified.
It’s so hard, I understand his feelings but he kept going on and on about it. He does have friends but he mostly communicates with them through gaming rather than in real life. He talks to friends at school and I encourage him to invite friends round which he does sometimes, but not very often. He went into a big tirade this morning about it again and all about how she’s getting the prom etc and he didn’t. I think I managed to appease it by saying we’ll take him and a friend or just us to go to a Ninja Warrior place and I think it worked. Fingers crossed! Any tips on dealing with jealousy like this that doesn’t involve being constantly equal?
