My lovely daughter is almost 17 months old. For the most part she is pretty awesome but she has started biting and I can’t get her to stop. She was doing the biting thing at 10-12 months when she was cutting a few teeth and a loud, firm “No!” pretty much put a stop to that.
Then all of the sudden yesterday the biting started again. I’ve tried the same “No!” with the addition of time-outs and now she apparently thinks it is funny. She smiles when I pull her away from me and tell her no so it is obvious she likes that she is getting a reaction and she fusses for a second in time out but seems to be fine with the punishment as long as it means she gets to bite me. My MIL recommended biting her back so she understands how badly it hurts but I’m against that, partly because she is so young and partly because if biting isn’t okay then it isn’t okay for mommy to bite her anymore than it is okay for her to bite anyone else. I might be willing to try it if she were 4 or 5 but at 17 months I don’t think she is old enough to make that connection and will probably just think that mommy hates her.
What is the best way to deal with a toddler who is biting? She has teething rings and toys but isn’t using them so I don’t think she is cutting any new teeth, though that is always a possibility, but even if she is teething biting other people is unacceptable. I’m interviewing for jobs and once I find one she is going to have to go to daycare so I need to nip this in the bud before she starts spending her days with other children.
Tell her “Ouch! That hurts mommy! We don’t hurt each other!” Not in a funny way, but in a serious way. Drop the pitch of your voice. Make eye contact.
Say “when you hurt mommy you don’t get to be near mommy”. Say nothing else. Do not engage her, tell her to stop laughing, anything. Put her in her crib, somewhere safe, for a minute or two.
Return and say, again in a low, serious voice. “You bit mommy. It hurt. You do not bite”.
Pick her up, give her a hug. Rinse and repeat.
She will eventually learn that being hurtful won’t get her attention and that hurting people is wrong. The key is repeating the script so it sinks in (17 mos is very young to quickly learn cause and effect) and the low, serious, non-playful voice.
If there are certain scenarios she usually bites you during, praise her when she doesn’t. When she’s eating tell her that “biting is for food, good job!” Reinforce the positive.
I think Widget was smaller when she experimented with biting,so that may make a difference, but we didn’t try to eliminate the biting, we redirected it. Each of us always had something biteable (teething ring, rubber spoon) in a pocket, and the minute she got that about-to-bite look, we shoved the rubber thing at her and went, ‘There you go, bite that all you want!’ I think it took about five days before she lost interest and quit biting.
Our general idea was that we want to teach her that most impulses aren’t bad in themselves (she wasn’t trying to hurt us, she was just interested in the way biting felt and the response it got), but they absolutely have to be channelled in appropriate directions.
I’m serious - you need to yell loud enough to startle her, so it isn’t fun to bite you. And then yell “CUT THAT OUT! THAT HURTS!” Don’t react calmly - it’s OK to get mad when someone bites you.
Or you can try to go the other way, make no response whatsoever to the bite, just go straight to a time out and ignore her. No yelling, no correcting, no attention at all. Correct afterwords.
The Firebug went through a biting stage - lasted probably a year, starting probably a little before he turned 2. We tried various things, nothing worked, eventually he seemed to just outgrow it.
YMMV, but correcting afterwards is too late (IMO) for a child that age. They’re like dogs - they need to be corrected (or encouraged if they do something good) right at the point where it happens.
And I never had success using time-outs as punishment. I only did time-outs when a child had lost it and was having a melt-down, to give them time to settle down and listen to reason (eventually), or in the sense of “you will sit on the time-out chair until you do as I told you”. I didn’t get the feeling that the child in the OP was out of control, in the sense of waging a tantrum - she just wanted to bite, and was willing to put up with a time-out as part of the bargain.
FWIW, this only happened to me once, when my daughter bit me. I reacted as described, yelling that I had feelings too, so cut that sh*t out. In almost so many words. But the clincher was what it usually was, where I said “I’m not going to play with you if you are going to bite me. Go play with someone else.” She hated it when I did that.
Good ideas here; I just want to add that she may not actually think the biting is funny. My kid also laughed sometimes when I’d reprimand him for biting or hurting me in some way, and it used to really piss me off. (And I also worried that he was turning into a sadistic sociopath.) Then one day, it occurred to me that this might actually be an instinctive submission display, just like other animals do. It might be that the kid realizes they’ve hurt you, and they laugh to basically say “Sorry! I’m not a real threat! I’m just playing! See how silly and harmless I am!” I have no evidence for this theory, other than what I’ve observed my kid do. But keeping this in mind helps me stay calm and keep perspective when I’m disciplining him, and prevents the downward spiral of anger --> submissive laughter --> more anger --> more laughter and silliness --> etc. --> both of us in tears. And for the record, we did a loud “No biting!” and timeout. And as Shodan said, it wasn’t so much a timeout as “I don’t want to be around people who hurt me, so I am going away from you for a moment.” It may have helped - it certainly didn’t make it any worse - but really, I think he just outgrew it.
My thought process is that the time out is the correction, giving the child no attention when they engage in bad attention-seeking behavior. You still might want to say the words, “biting is bad”, but in a different context because that’s the attention she wants.
My son did this. I’m scolding him for one transgression or another and he’s just smiling at me. Eventually, really pissed off, I say “why are you smiling at me?” and he comes back with “Because I want you to be happy.” :smack:
Borrowing this idea from an old thread: When she bites you, put her in time-out and pick up her favorite stuffed animal. Then make her watch while you bite the toy. You can also put her stuffed animal into time-out at the same time as her (like put it on the floor, facing the corner). Kids that age may have difficulty empathizing with their parents, but they tend to empathize greatly with their toys. Although she doesn’t mind time-out for herself, I’m betting she’ll be bothered enough to stop if you put her stuffed animal in time-out, too.
Well, as much as it seemed useless yesterday the time-outs and the loud reactions seemed to have worked in the end. So far today she has gnawed on her toys and her fingers but she hasn’t even attempted to bite me at all.
I put my daughter in time out twice today, both for lack of cooperation on her part. It worked a charm, for that. After she screamed for me in her crib for two minutes, I’d come back and she’d meekly submit to what needed doing (hair brushing, teeth brushing).
So I’ve had luck with using TO to increase behavior, but not yet to decrease it.
if it happens again, I think the best response depends on the kid. Loud (negative) attention didn’t help with my eldest; what worked was quickly, silently putting her down on the floor, then walking away and completely ignoring her for a few. She didn’t even get the attention of being put in time out. She HATED that. The key is figuring out what your kid hates the most, and incorporating that.