My son bit my daughter — and so it begins…
I took my kids to visit their great grandmother and in the two minutes I left them alone in the living room, so I could kiss grandma hello, my daughter (age four and a half) managed to rip out of her brother’s hands the singing monkey he’d just found on the window ledge. He is two and a half. She is bigger and quite often just takes what she wants from him. We tell her that he is going to catch-up — and when he does she won’t be able to get away with stuff like that. Well, since he can’t match her physically yet he’s found a way to deter her.
After he tried unsuccessfully to take back the monkey with force, he bit her. And I mean, he really bit her. By the time I heard my daughter screaming and ran into the living room (which was all of three steps) he’d already moved away, with monkey in hand, victorious.
Being the youngest of three kids I can understand where he is coming from. In fact, part of me thought my daughter deserved the bite, but I couldn’t condone the behavior, by either of them. Plus, there is an anger that kind of takes over when you see your kid hurting, even if maybe they had it coming (a little).
So my son got a time-out and seemed to really feel bad that his sister had a full set of his teeth marks on her bicep (which, by the way, was just short of breaking skin.) They hugged and made-up and there were promises from both sides that there would be no more “taking” and no more biting. All was good in the world — and they were once again best friends. That is, they were best friends until the next night when my daughter wanted to ride the rocking horse my son was on… she got her way and ended up on the horse and then he stood up for himself the only way he knew how. At least this time the teeth marks weren’t so bad.
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My friend brifar on Twitter sent me a message saying “it could be worse” with this link: http://tinyurl.com/dytq3q – he is so right!
As a fellow youngest of three – its a self preservation thing for sure. I definitely wouldn’t condone the biting, it clearly needs to be stopped, but you do have to feel for the kid. She’s got about a foot on him, he’s just using what he’ got. Unless of course he were to use it on my daughter, then I might bite him back when you weren’t looking. :) HA!!! Just kidding. Maybe.
Learning words to get what you want is key to help reduce the physical responses to these communication problems. We used to have a problem with biting but as my son was able to verbalize (and get positive results) we saw the behavior improve.