This is pretty tricky to explain but I’ll try my best. My wife and I have kids aged 15, 14, 10 and 2 years old. My wife gave birth a week ago today to another boy. Kind of irrelevant but also relevant, the baby likely isn’t mine, so although me and my wife have tried to keep things normal for the kids, they might have picked up on some tension.

To the point, our 10 year old is autistic. He’s “high functioning”, he usually just struggles with making friends and things like that. A few months ago he started having seizures and a lot of behavioral changes. He started peeing himself multiple times a day at school, pooping in secret and on a couple of occasions smearing it in his room, and having a lot of meltdowns too. He’s been like a different kid since the seizure activity started. It was suggested it could be epilepsy induced by puberty, which would make sense. He’s now on seizure medication and has been for a couple of weeks. Unfortunately the meds have a side effect of causing anger issues.

We thought he would cope better than he is with the new baby, he was the perfect big brother when our 2 year old was born, but I guess we hadn’t taken into account all of the recent big changes for him. This time around he’s a total wreck and we don’t know how to help him cope. He’s not coping with the crying or even any noises the baby is making, he panics at the slightest noise. He’s become scary with his rage too. The worst thing he’s doing is he’s become obsessed with my wife’s breasts. He’s always had a fixation on boobs, I don’t know if it’s an autism thing. But since she’s started breastfeeding again he’s become fixated on my wife. She avoids feeding the baby in view of him, but it doesn’t matter. Last night was scary. He went into a total rage when he tried to grab at her and she told him no, and he ended up ripping her shirt pulling at it and trying to grab her bra and pull it down. His 13 year old sister got a busted lip trying to stop him and was obviously shaken by the whole thing. He’s bitten, kicked, punched, and lashed out any way he can over the smallest things since the baby came home. He’s usually the sweetest kid ever and it fucking breaks my heart to see him like this.

If anybody has any suggestions for helping him cope and distracting him before he gets to the rage or assault stage I’d really appreciate it. I’m looking into getting my own place which would help because he’ll have a place completely away from the baby. In the mean time we’re really struggling to stop him getting to the point he tips over the edge.