10 Ways to Deal With a Child Biting your Child

Biting is usually a cry for help from a child. For whatever reason, that child doesn’t feel like they have any other way to ask for what they need so they bite out of frustration. Keep this in mind before you do anything else.

1. Put yourself in that parent’s shoes. It’s important to separate the children immediately, but don’t get overly upset because will just add stress to an already stressful situation. Making sure that your child is okay and is safe is the most important thing. These things are often isolated occurrences and they won’t happen again. Give you child extra hugs and kisses and don’t dwell on the bite.
2. Discuss the situation with the staff. Now what do you do if your child has been repeated bitten by the same child in a daycare setting? No one has even told you about what is going on. You need to contact the person in charge of the daycare and find out what is going on. Find out if they have witnessed the biting and what they are doing about it. Let them know your concern that you child has been bitten repeatedly and no one contacted you about it. This is a time when you might want to consider changing daycares.
3. Separate the children. What do you do if the biting child is the child of one of your best friends and you often go to the park together? Discuss it with your friend and find out what she is doing to curb his biting habit. If she is open you can let her know what you’ve read on the subject. Let her know that you are concerned and that you don’t want to have to stop going to the park together, but that you may have to keep the kids separated until the other child gets over the biting.
4. Closely supervise the children. Since biting usually occurs when a child gets frustrated keep an extra close eye on the offending child and see if you can see the frustration happening and short circuit it before the biting happens. That might be enough to break the cycle of biting for that child.
5. Help the biter know that they’ve hurt your child. Now I don’t mean you should yell at the kid. Keep in mind that you are usually dealing with a small child when biting occurs and therefore they may not be able to understand a bit explanation. Tell them that biting people is wrong and that they should bite food not their friends.
6. Help them show empathy. Ask them to look at their friend and tell them that he/she is crying because you hurt them by biting them. Don’t say it in a blaming tone, but just a factual tone. Then ask them to go with you to get an ice pack for their friend’s owie. They will understand that explanation and should be able to understand that they don’t want to cause their friend to cry again.
7. Talk it over with your child: This may not be possible with all kids, but if they are verbal it might be beneficial to talk to your child about what they were doing before they were bitten. If they can tell you what was happening, it might give you a clue as to why the other child bit them. Give your child some examples of what they can say to that child or any other child in the future if things seem to be getting out of hand like this time when they were bitten.
8. See what the policy is for biting at your daycare. If this is happening at a daycare find out what their policy is with biting. Many daycares have a maximum number of times that a child can bite before they ask them to leave the daycare. I know this seems harsh, but if your child has been bitten several times you want to get it to stop by any means possible.
9. Read them a book about bullying. Most times biting isn’t a bullying technique, but it can be and solutions to stop bullying may help your child stop other children from biting them. This is especially important if you child is older like in a preschool situation. Make sure they know they should talk to a teacher about the biting. Tell your child to stay away from the child that bites them.
10. Shower attention on the child who was bitten. Sometimes children who bite are trying to get attention and they will take negative attention if they are not getting enough positive attention. You don’t want to give the biter the attention. Tell the child that bit your child that what they did hurt your child and that is not how they should treat their friends. Then ignore that child and comfort your child. If the biter gets attention by biting they will keep doing it.

Taken From Find a Nanny