How to Resolve Biting in Children
This video is about toddlers’ biting behavior. Biting behavior in toddlers is a completely normal behavior.
Toddlers find it difficult to manage their emotions and are extremely impulsive, and they have a limited number of words to communicate, so they use actions to communicate. Biting is a really effective action used by most of the toddlers.
When a toddler bites, they get an immediate response and attention from the people around them, and instantly they change the environment and get what they want or avoid doing what they don’t want to do. The immediate response shown by parents or caregivers to biting is either they lecture their kid and tell them why biting is not good or they punish the kids.
Punishing the kid or telling them not to do this in the future would not stop your child’s biting habits, and punishment also sends the message to the kid that using violence is an acceptable behavior to solve problems.
To better equip your child to learn using alternate behaviors, it is important to get down to the eye level of your kid, stay calm, use a calm voice with a neutral face, and limit arm movement. Make them realize that he/she is not playing safely and take the toy and attention away from the kid; give your child some time, at least 30 minutes, and then talk to them about what happened and try to identify other ways by which they can manage their emotions.
Roleplay activities can also be really helpful to teach alternate behaviors.
