Good day to you all,

This is my first time writing about this so forgive me if I'm a bit nervous or you might find some things confusing along the way. I need your help about my 8 year old boy cousin.

A bit of background:

My cousin and I are related through my aunt who is the younger half-sister of my mother. My mother is a doctor practicing general medicine, so it's in her nature to care about other people and extend help, especially those related to us. My aunt is a former sales person, she is a free-spirited woman, in her younger years she likes to travel and part and unfortunately, she got mixed up with bad people. She abused drugs and went to rehab more than twice and I believe she has now schizophrenia. She is not the same as before and she is not fully capable of raising two kids on her own. My aunt has two kids: one male, lets call him RJ (8) and one female (6) lets call her JR. They are all living with my grandma in their old house a few blocks away from our own home. My granda (80 ) cant freely move around anymore due to old age. In our house, aside from my mom(60), there's me(29), my sister(31), my older brother(33) and dad(61).

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The Problem:

The kids were born out of my aunt's desire to have a family. Before her addiction, she always wanted a family and still wanted to after rehabilitation. On her pre-addiction days, my aunt is a heavy piece of work, so what more under the influence, so to cut it short she gave birth to two kids.

When she was admitted to rehab for the second time, my grandmother cant fully look after the kids because of her old age, and their hyper active nature makes it hard for a slow-moving grandparent to monitor them always. Since our house is a few blocks away and my mom likes to help, we decided to take care of the kids and live in our home, at first, it was happy and tiring at the same time. They are both delightful, naughty, smart, and joyful.

They stayed with us for nearly three years with my grandmother visiting them every once in a while. After, my aunt's rehab and my cousins' schooling makes it hard for us to manage the funds so we have decided to give my aunt a chance and get her home. The situation was reversed and the kids were then again entrusted to my aunt's care, because we tried to believe that taking care of her own kids might give her enough reason to change or at least give her some things to do other than loiter around town. At first, it was okay but a few months after that, she went back to being her old self and started to being a problem again for the people around her. Things escalated to bad levels and we have decided to send her back to rehab.

My grandma moved in with us along with my cousins and it was a bit of a chaos inside the home. My grandma is too controlling and interfering with how we discipline the kids. She's too traditional and old school and sometimes confusing, we believe favoritism is at play here and it affects the kids relationship with her and each other. Financial burden again was the reason so we decided to take my aunt home, and now she's free again to do what she wants.

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Our present setting:

My aunt and grandmother are back to their original home. To ease some of the heavy load on raising the kids, we've decided to take one kid live with us, then they will swap with each other every week, so that my aunt and grandma will just have to worry about one. We can't take two because all of us in the house have our own jobs to worry. I think this is a factor to our problem since our methods of discipline is not consistent with them as they can do whatever they want in my grandmas house with little to no consequences.

Please note that RJ is very disrespectful when it comes only to my grandma, and his pranks are only directed at her. But when RJ is with us, he is naughty but he does not do his antics to any of us.

Now, it is not news that RJ is a really naughty kid but sometimes, his antics, mostly directed to my grandmother, are really alarming, spraying water on her face to wake her up, spraying Lysol on her face, messing / throwing things out of order when my grandmother scold him, and hiding my grandmother's slippers so that she couldn't walk right away among others. My grandmother already notified us about this before and did out best to address this, we calmly talk to the kids about their bad behavior and tried the most warm approach that we can do.

But again, its not really doing anything now. I believe we need to do something for RJ, but I really don't know how or where to begin. The first thing that comes to my head is to take him to a child psychologist, to identify the exact problem and to formulate a solution that will help him long-term, but due to the impact of the pandemic, I cant easily access that help now. Punishing the kids (stay in the corner, squat and on rare occasion spanking them as corporal punishment) is the last thing we want, but I tried it as a last resort before but I don't want the idea of getting used on resorting to these methods.

This is a bit out of hand and I just want these kids to be raised right, but there are too many grown ups in the house and some of them are contradicting one plan over the other, and I also think it's a factor why the kids don't take our words very seriously. My sister and I are always on the same page, but sometimes, my mom and her sympathetic nature gets in the way of that. My mom is sometimes too stubborn to listen to us, even though our approach is logical. She always believe that kind actions can do the trick, I believe that too, but not all situations are appropriate for that. These kids have been through so much, and I think they need more than kind words from us.

I hope you could help me figure out what to do aside from seeking professional help.

IF you have any other questions or clarifications, please do let me know and I will try to answer it.