What do you do when your child is the one no-one wants their children to play with?
“It’s just a stage,” they said.
When my son was around eight months old, he started biting.
The first time he bit another child, I was horrified. I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know what to do. I stood there in shock of what had just happened.
Of course, I reprimanded him, but I felt helpless.
What could I do while another child was sobbing into his mother’s arms because my child had sunk his teeth into him?
I apologised profusely but there was not much I could say. I took my son and went home, ashamed of what he had done but firmly told him no, and hoped it would never happen again.
And then it kept happening. Every time another child grabbed a toy from him, he bit. If he was angry, he bit. I read every book, every article, every blog post about managing a child that bites but I just couldn’t stop it.
I read that it was an attention thing, a frustration thing. It was because he was a boy. It was because he couldn’t communicate properly yet. I even read that I should bite him back to show him the consequences of his actions. This particularly didn’t sit well with me, and so never happened.
He looked at me, as he handed over the tissues and said it was common, and just a phase. I remember thinking, that's all very well and good until no-one wants to be around your child, which I fully understood.
It got so bad that I stopped going to mothers' group. Once you've been forced to take your child home in a flurry of apologies that many times you just get to the point where you think it's best if you don't go at all. I stopped taking him around other children because every time I did, I would sit in nervous anxiety waiting to jump in and grab him if he looked like he was going to bite someone.
I was beyond embarrassed at the behaviour, and isolated myself so that it couldn't happen. I missed my friends and their babies but I know that no other child (or mother) should have to deal with being hurt and I was sick of dissolving into a pile of tears the second I got home after another incident.
I felt like such a failure. Like the worst mother in the world. My friends assured me that they still wanted to see us, so I started meeting up with them again. I tried to manage the behaviour as much as I could and if he did bite someone, we left immediately. I tried to be consistent and reinforce that this behaviour was not on.
I'm happy to say that my son did grow out of this phase, and yes, maybe it was a combination of frustration and lack of communication that causes him to lash out.
But now, he is the most amazing, friendly, energetic little man that I always knew he was, with no evidence of his old habits. I'm no longer the mother hovering nervously over her child, trying to pre-empt what may happen. It's such a relief to actually let him play with other children at the park in relative freedom without worry.
Now and then I read posts from other mothers on forums asking what they should do if their child starts biting and my heart goes out to them. It's hard being the mother of a child who bites. It's embarrassing, it's frustrating.
It's not right, but that's what childhood is about - learning. Learning what's appropriate, what's acceptable.
So if your child does happen to come home with a bite mark from daycare or preschool, you have every right to be angry and upset, but just go easy. You don't know that the mother of that child isn't spending every waking minute trying to correct this behaviour. Devoting all of her emotional energy into teaching her child, and crying endless tears of frustration because she doesn't know what to do.
Was your child the biter? How did you manage this difficult stage?
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