by Jennifer Moore

Created on: February 13, 2009

In order to effectively discipline a child who bites, you first have to understand why children bite. There are three main motives that drive children to bite. The first is the obvious, expressive. Expressive biting is when a child uses the biting as a way to express his or her feelings such as anger, frustration, desire for attention or independence, stress relief and self defense. The second is experimentation; this includes biting just because they saw another child do it and curiosity of what will happen if they bite. The third is the most often overlooked but extremely important to considertexture. They simply like the way it feels.

In all cases, it's important to tell the child that it's not okay to bite. But what you do next can greatly impact how the child responds to your discipline. When it comes to expressive biting, show the biter an appropriate way to express his or her feelingswords. Teach the little snapper phrases that he or she can use next time she wants to express those feelings. Keep it simple and on their level, for example, if the child is biting in self defense, teach him or her to turn to the offender and shout "NO!" rather than biting. For both experimentation and texture, the little nibbler is probably not as aware of their effects on the other child. Have the two children (biter and bitee) face each other and have the biter pay attention to the bitee, who's probably crying at this point, and note how the bitee is feeling. Again, keep in on their level, you could say something like "Look at Emily, she's crying. You hurt Emily, we don't bite." For the little one who bites for the texture, also offer plenty of other ways they can enjoy different textures to bite such as carrots, bananas and other things that have fun to bite textures.

As a caregiver or parent of a biter, there are a few things that you can keep in mind to help you cope with the stress and frustration of biting and to help you understand why it's important to deal with the underlying issue. First of all, know that this is a phase that many children go through and it will pass. Secondly, toddlerhood is when biting is most prominent for several reasons. One is that toddlers simply do not have the capacity to anticipate cause and effect, so in order to find out what will happen if they were to do something, they literally have to do it. Another reason biting is more common in toddlerhood is that toddlers have an extremely difficult time taking the feelings of other people in to consideration; they are still learning how to do this. Toddlerhood is also the time when children are especially intrigued by texture, paired with their inability to anticipate cause and effect biting is almost irresistible. What ever you do, please don't bite your child back, this does little good for anyone involved.

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