Don't get bit

I’m sensing a trend here…responding to articles from Parent magazines; but perhaps it will become one of the better venues for challenging the “norm” as Parent magazine is about as watered down, status quo as you can get.

This time the article was about a mother who supposedly became a better parent because her daughter was a biter. The general idea: no matter what she did, her daughter continued to bite everyone around her for two years. At the end, she realized that you never know what kind of kid you’re going to get and you just have to roll with the punches and accept them for who they are.

Bologna. Let me ask you to consider something. Have you ever seen a baby poke itself in the eye more than a couple times? Does a toddler bite their tongue (on purpose)? Newborns gag on their hands for a couple months, and then stop. Why? It is because of pain. Even the youngest babies can learn the relationship between an action and the pain it causes; that’s why they’re not still gagging themselves at one years old.

Here is what this mother wrote about her response to the biting:

“My husband and I didn’t stand idly by. We used time-outs. We tried rewards for not biting. We offered teething toys as an alternative. We read her stories about biting children who learn the error of their ways. We had gentle, reasoned discussions about how much biting hurts and why we can’t do it. We screamed and yelled. And once, when the victim was our newborn and I was out of my head from sleep deprivation, I spanked her. None of it worked.”

Now keep in mind that this little girl started biting when she was still nursing at NINE months old, and continued until she was two and a half. So they were having time outs and reasoned discussions with an 18 month old? Notice that spanking was done “once” and was only because the mother was sleep deprived? She did mention that people advised her to bite her back and she “in her darker hours wondered if she should have.”

Should she have bitten her back? No. What she should have done is caused that baby pain every time she bit. Maybe not the first time, but definitely the second. How? She could have pinched her hand, or her leg. I poked my daughter’s cheek with my fingernail when she bit me. It made her cry pretty hard, but she’s never bitten me again.

I’m not denying that some children might have the propensity to bite more than others, but what I am saying is that ALL children respond to pain and ALL children will eventually learn that when they do “A” and they immediately feel pain, to stop doing “A”. It’s a natural response even seen in animals.

Consistency is also extremely key. Every single time they bite, they should feel a small amount of pain. You don’t have to bruise your kid to get the point across. You shouldn’t pinch, flick, poke, or spank very hard when they’re young but you do need to cause enough pain, EVERY time, to make the connection in their brain than when they bite, it hurts. I guarantee that it will stop. I challenge you to prove me otherwise.