Help - A Biter

[scottiedog]

Hi There,

 

We have a little boy, who is just over 3, starting at our pre-school in a week or two. Within the first 10 min of his pre-start visit he bit another child. According to Mum this is something he regularly does.

 

Does anyone have any ideas and tips on how to handle and deal with this, does anyone have a 'biting policy', is it something we need to put into place? Not sure where to start as we luckily enough, have never had a biter before.

 

Thanking you all

Scottiedog

[Pimms o'clock?]

Oh no, not you too; I feel for you and your team and all I can say is you definately need eyes in the back of your head. We are so pleased that we have had two bite free days last week.

 

I've been doing a bit of reseach on this, it seems that September shows higher incidents of biting and a greater number are boys.

 

It might have been that the visit was very stressful for the child and they were unable to vocalise this.

 

Our biter is 22 months and is definately having problems vocalising and also bites the one child more than any other. One incident he was happily playing with cars on the floor, one car in each hand, other child (aged 3 years) tries to take a car so he gets up and runs off with older child in hot persuit, stops in a corner with cars in hands firmly grasped behind his back, older child reaches over both his shoulders and the next thing would have been a bite had I not been there ready to intervene.

 

The mother of the victim is worried that he will become afraid of the biter, I wish he would be afraid then he would stop provoking him if he learnt a lesson from his injuries.

 

The only thing we are able to do is be ready to intervene when situations arise and "talk" through it for the younger child "...... must stop chasing you and you can tell him to "stop" if you don't like what he is doing" "we use teeth to eat our dinner, not to bite people"

 

I also read that getting the biter to sooth the victim should help them to empathise and begin to realise the consequences of their actions.

 

Hopefully it will stop soon.

 

BMG

Edited September 18, 2010 by BMG

[Guest]

Oh gosh, I sympathise with you, I have a little boy of 19 months in my room who constantly bites given the chance, he will take his dummy out to bite the children, and he really sinks his teeth in, various chats with his mum who says he is teething! but this has been going on for some time now, whilst I do agree that teething can result in them doing this, he cant be teething constantly. It is very hard to discipline him because of his age, he just doesnt understand that what he is doing is wrong, I encourage him to give the other child a cuddle which he does, but he has to be watched constantly when he is in, its really hard to know what else to do.

[Inge]

i worked with over 3s so this is what we did after an incident which tended to work well.

 

We kept the children together.. and turned out back on the biter.. made an enormous over the top fuss on the child who was the victim..emphasising on how it hurt, looking at it.. really went for it! all the while the other child was present but effectively being ignored... ( well they thought so , we had an eye on them too!) then when we felt we had fussed enough it was time to make sure the child knew it hurt was not right and they had made us 'sad' because they had done it... depending on the child how this was done...

 

this way the child doing the biting is not the one which is fussed over and getting attention... a simple message but one many seemed to take in.. may take a few times but it usually worked.

 

and it was often a lack of being able to say what they wanted so had just worked out a way to get what they wanted in a different way. by keeping them away from what they wanted it also helped reinforce they do not get something by this action but get removed and lose it altogether.

 

if they bite a lot at home it made me wonder if they got the attention, all be it negative, from their actions, so would try to work out a way to help parents not give a lot of attention but deal with the situation and move on.. also we felt important when telling parents on collection as so many would then try to 'tell the child off' for biting which had happened so long ago it was forgotten, but still got attention from their actions..

 

All I say is think about how much attention you give the instigator rather than the victim... while they need help to prevent the action it may just be attention they get is not stopping them repeating it. ( Ok not good grammar but you know what I mean!)

 

Inge