A concerned mother recently reached out to a large virtual support group of fellow moms to seek advice regarding a distressing incident involving her young child.
She described all sorts of challenges that commonly face working moms today, from the adjustment involved in heading back to work to all-important considerations regarding child care. But at the heart of this particular discussion was a subject that I have long found to be of universal interest to parents and others who take care of young kids: biting.
The virtual response this mom got to her tale of woe was impressive: Hundreds of other moms weighed in, sharing their own biting experiences, insights and frustrations. As I’ve found over several decades interacting with young children and their caregivers, biting can become the bane of a parent’s existence — whether you’re upset your child has been bitten, or the frustrated parent of a biter.
[See: The 11 Most Dangerous Places in Your Home for Babies and Small Kids.]
To tackle this issue, I’ve found it most useful for everyone involved to step away from the particular situation at hand — at least for a moment — and start with a clear understanding of what biting does, and doesn’t, represent.
The best way I’ve found to explain it is that biting happens to be the least socially acceptable of all of the predictable and developmentally normal behaviors of early childhood. The thought of one child trying to take a bite out of another child has come to be perceived as far more distasteful than, say, hitting, pinching, pushing, kicking, shrieking or any of a whole host of less-than-desirable toddler behaviors. There’s something about the discovery of a human bite mark on one’s child that parents find especially disturbing. However, a young child’s predilection to bite both friends and foes isn’t abnormal.
Resisting the urge to bite (or kick or hit or pinch or throw a fit, for that matter) inherently involves impulse control. Herein lies the fundamental problem. You see, impulse control happens to be one of three defining features of what are called executive function skills. These skills undergo a period of rapid development between the ages of 3 and 5. But before the age of 3 — prior to those significant changes — kids sorely lack impulse control.
[Read: 5 Ways You Can Teach Your Kids to Properly Manage Anger.]
This leaves us with the ongoing challenge of managing a behavior deemed socially unacceptable over which we know toddlers have little control, but that we all agree they need to stop. While any given incident involving biting requires a closer look at the circumstances, there are a couple key overarching approaches I’d recommend to address the issue.
First, react with disapproval, not anger. In recognizing that the ability to control one’s impulses doesn’t really start to kick in until the age of 3, one must also recognize that getting angry at a toddler’s lack of impulse control is analogous to getting mad at that same toddler because he can’t tie his own shoes.
Now before you jump to the conclusion that “don’t get angry” means I’m advocating for being overly permissive, remember that anger and disapproval are not the same thing. Even very young children are quite sensitive to the emotional state of their caregivers, care a whole lot about pleasing us, and rely on us to help them learn to distinguish good behavior from bad behavior. Expressing one’s disapproval of biting, rather than anger, is therefore not only appropriate, but I would suggest far more effective in teaching toddlers not to bite.
This leads to another observation: that it’s best to treat incidents of biting as teachable moments. Impulse control is clearly a very important skill to master. That’s true not only in order to refrain from biting one’s friends as a toddler, but so as to be able to practice appropriate restraint throughout one’s life.
[See: 10 Concerns Parents Have About Their Kids’ Health.]
While we know that this ability develops rapidly during the early years, it takes time, practice and patience on the part of all of us whose job it is to both model and teach impulse control. In the context of helping a child to learn and perfect a new skill, getting angry about failed attempts seems all the more inappropriate. Also, we don’t want to teach kids to retaliate in anger should they be bitten by a peer.
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What to Do When Your Toddler Bites originally appeared on usnews.com
