Orange County Register

 4 Comments

• justsayin says:

  November 4, 2009 at 9:49 am

  When my son was little he started biting. Once he bit me on the ches to hard it left a huge bite mark bruise that lasted weeks and was very painful. My daugther seems only to bite her big brothers when she is mad at them. The way I got both of them to stop before it got too out of hand was to bite back. Of course I didn’t bite very hard, but enough that they didn’t like it and stopped. It worked!
• Julie Scott says:

  November 4, 2009 at 10:56 am

  I got lucky because my daughter was never a biter, but her cousin drove us crazy with her biting to the point that we stopped agreeing to babysit her (this might seem mean, but it’s really really hard to discipline another person’s child - too much drama). She grew out of it eventually, if that’s any consolation.

  In our attempts to raise an independent child capable of thinking out of the box and for herself, we’ve run into the unintended consequence of creating a back talker. Luckily she doesn’t really do anything wrong, per se, but she’s gaining a reputation with her teachers for correcting them on things. (Although, to be fair, she’s usually right, and it’s usually to protect her precious grades - like trying to convince a teacher that “pip” is a word when she got marked down on a class exercise. Yes, we’re raising “that kid”.)
• Martha says:

  November 5, 2009 at 10:49 am

  My daughter was a biter and you definitely want to discourage this if possible. When he gets into social interactions with other children you do not want to be the parent of a biter. All the other parents will give you the stink eye, like you have done something wrong in raising your kid. That hurts almost as much as when your kid bites you.

  We would watch for her signals that she was about to bite and then redirect her. Often it is out of frustration because they don’t have a lot of words at Sam’s age, but he wants to express himself. Helping him to express himself by teaching him words or some people use sign language can help prevent biting. Biting back never worked for us.
• justsayin says:

  November 5, 2009 at 11:29 am

  Children bite because it’s a way they can have control. They can tell by reactions it works. Bobby is trying to take toy from Johnny. Johnny bites Bobby. Bobby drops toy. Other kids can ignore words but not bites. It really depends on the age and how much they understand. Mine knew it was effective, but were too young to know or even care that the other person got hurt. That is until they found out for themselves. It may not work for everyone or every age. It worked for me beacause my little ones understood, once they felt it, that biting hurts and it’s not a good thing. They didn’t want it done to them so they stopped.