DS has developed some very destructive behaviour over the last two or three weeks which I'm really struggling to deal with.

I think the cause of it is tiredness. He's getting to a stage where he doesn't need to be having a nap every day. This has meant that there have been a whole host of inconsistencies come into our nap time routine. For the longest time I rocked him to sleep at nap time, but then he started wanting to go to sleep by himself in the bed. This was fine with me. About 50% of the time he would go to sleep no problems, but there were/are some days where he doesn't need/want a nap. On those days I've been encouraging quiet time in his bed and giving him a stack of books to read. To begin with this worked really well, I'd tell him he needed to stay in bed until mummy came to get him and he was happy to sit there and read his books. But... a couple of weeks ago he decided it was more fun to start trashing his room. He will kick the bed rails off, throw books and toys everywhere, climb his furniture, whatever it takes to get out of there and not even attempt a nap. Now here's the clincher, he's at daycare 3 days a week and goes to sleep all by himself, every day...

Now, I'm finding that he is beginning to take great delight in being destructive at other times. I'm a big believer that there is always a reason behind negative behaviour, and I honestly believe that most of time this is brought on by tiredness or on the odd occasion to get attention.

The problem is that my usual techniques just aren't working and to break the behaviour I am resorting to yelling to stop it. I don't like to yell at him, it makes him cry, and while it may be effective right now at stopping the behaviour I am under no illusion that it is by any means going to be a long term solution.

Usually I approach these sort of things by picking him up and removing him from the situation and then talking about why we don't do these things (eg. we can break our toys or even worse somebody could get hurt etc etc). I'm reading PET at the moment so am also using some of those techniques (this behaviour made me feel etc), which we're having great success with in other areas, just not this one. When I try these in this situation he starts hitting, kicking, pulling my hair (all while laughing) to get me to put him down so he can resume it.

So I think the first problem I need to solve is the nap one. I just have no idea where to start...

And, I need some help developing tools/techniques/discussions for addressing the destructive behaviour when it does happen.

Oh, and this is all compounded by the fact that we're having a baby in 2.5 weeks (which could very well be contributing to this). I fear that if we can't get on top of it now it is only going to get worse when bubs arrives...

Thanks for reading... Any ideas, insights, suggestions (or hugs) would be very much appreciated.