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MrsB 09:36 AM 02-06-2012
As a daycare provider for many years, I have seen my fair share of biters. Although I see the need for the child to be picked up, for the daycare to place sole responsibility on the parents isnt necessarily fair. Since alot of times the parent isnt seeing it at home. With most of the children I have had biting using a technique where you simply say "no biting, that hurts" and exclude them from your attention, the childs attention, and what ever activity they are doing or toy they are playing with seems to help better than going into a big long explanation. When you are talking to a toddler the fewer words you use the more they will understand. Esentially you are giving them a time out but I try not to use the word time out. Kids are in timeout so much that they become desensatized to it. If you can make more fuss about the child who is hurt and more ignoring of the biting behavior then they wont use biting as tecnique to get attention. Also for the kids that are doing out of frustration. You have to "see" the frustration and direct it in the right way before the result is biting. Biting is an end result of frustration. We have a bean bag pillow that the kids use when they are really frustrated and they learn to hit the pillow and use their words to the pillow to calm down rather than hiting or biting the other kids. Once they learn this then they can direct their words towards the kids rather than the pillow.
In one instance, I had a child that was an aweful biter, I tried everything I knew of to try. I was in constant contact with the parent on different things to try. Together with the parent we came up with using a squirt bottle. If I saw him begin to get frustrated or go to bite, I would squirt him more on a stream than a mist. Sure it took alot of time on my part the first few hours, because I had to basically have an eye on him at all times. When I would make lunch, or go potty, I had to have him come with me. It only took one day and about 5 times of getting squirted and he pretty much stopped. Over the next 2 days I caught him going for the bite a few times but then we were all done! The squirt bottle was a last ditch effort and I felt absolutely horrible doing it but it did work. Keep in mind, I was in complete agreeance with the parents and we wrote down everything that I was doing and our "plan" and we all signed it.
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