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Early Years
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Biting ways When the teeth get going, the pain begins The voice from the backseat was weighted with gravity unusual .for a 4 1/2-year-old: “The saddest thing happened the other day,” our son announced. “What?” we asked in typical parental unison chorus. “I can’t tell you,” he replied, “it’s too sad. I can’t tell you until I am 6.” Suspicion aroused, I accelerated into Super Mama mode. I carefully explained why we share everything, especially sad things and how sharing the sadness helps. Super Mama doesn’t wear a cape or climb up walls but she wields critical thinking and persuasion expertly, or so she likes to imagine. A big sigh arrived, then the confession, confused with the usual tangle of time: “Yesterday, last week, after lunch, at school, when I was playing with Gabe, I bit his ear. And Gabe told me that he wouldn’t ever be my friend again. That is the saddest thing. What he told me.” Our son, a biter? I hadn’t seen signs of this before, not even with my Super Mama empathy-vision, at least not since he was much younger and biting was, according to the experts, one way of interacting with the world and telling the world with his teeth what he couldn’t yet say in words. Perplexed, I asked a friend, mother of two now grown boys and she quickly told a tale perhaps familiar to many: When she was a child and bit, her mother promptly bit her back. That’s what the pediatrician had told her own mother to do, way back then when she was a child. These days, pediatricians caution parents against biting their children. Instead of discouraging the offending behavior, biting back may in fact encourage it and teach that a violent response is the most effective. They remind us that biting is not abnormal, but part of a range of typical behaviors; only when it becomes excessive should it been seen as a crisis. Still, unlike other phases our children grow through, biting often elicits a particular distress. And how many episodes is excessive, I wonder? Behaviors are motivated by needs – attention, power, fear – and in order to effectively deal with biting, it helps to know what motivates the biting child. Like other child behaviors, children may see other children resort to biting and imitate it. That kind of biting is perhaps the simplest to address. Modeling appropriate behavior and offering critiques of undesirable conduct is, as we are told over and over, at the core of parenting. Sometimes, biting is a means of seeking attention and getting it. Other children bite in self-defense, because they are frightened or threatened. The threat could be immediate – a playground conflict – or something larger – discord at home, a recent death in the family, some major shift in the shape of the child’s world. Some children bite as a way of asserting control or power in a situation. Frustrated, perhaps lacking coping skills, the child resorts to violence. After the event, not only does the bitten child need comfort but the biter will feel overwhelmed and frightened by his or her own behavior, not to mention sense that his community has responded in revulsion and horror, pinning an invisible letter “B” on him and keeping their distance in the playground. Indeed, our biter in the backseat grew quiet after his confession and seemed as if he were reliving the saddest day of his life and the emotions that went along with what he clearly saw was his mistake. So we talked about how he felt and how Gabe must have felt and what he could to do make Gabe his friend once again. The reaction to biting is often more extreme than other aggressive behaviors – pushing, hitting, kicking. This might have to do with the nature of the beast, as it were – teeth, powerful jaws, the potential of skin breakage, germs, blood, saliva. The bitten child or, more likely the parents, may react strongly to the injury. Indeed, I wondered what Gabe’s mother thought of us, and could hear her in my mind’s ear advising that those people might bite, but they didn’t, and I could feel a bit of my own child’s shame. It turns out that plenty of kids bite (1-in-10, according to the National Association for the Education of Young Children) and get bitten – and yes, they outgrow it. But as with everything, they need our help along the way. The goal of parents and caregivers should be to teach communication skills to children so that they continue to develop self-control and are more likely and able to use words, instead of their teeth. Lisa Alvarez is a regular contributor. |
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