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Biting is a normal part of development in young children. getty “The daycare director called and said my kid is a biter. They are implementing a behavior plan and say he might get kicked out.” It’s a common story in the pediatrician’s office and on social media. The negative label “biter” alone is alarming to parents, and the misguided punitive approach taken by daycares is all too common. What are parents to do?
Physical Aggression Is A Normal Behavior In Toddlers
Biting, like other forms of violence, are a normal part of development in young children, until they gain enough skills to communicate without it. Not only is aggression normal, it increases in young children between the ages of six and twenty-four months. In a 2019 study of 477 mothers with children between the ages of six and twenty-four months, 94% of the children had engaged in one of nine physically aggressive behaviors in the past month. The average child in that study was physically aggressive one to three days per week.
Why Do Toddlers Bite?
Toddlers bite. They bite teething toys, they bite objects we don’t want them too, and sometimes they bite each other. From a developmental perspective there are two main reasons why kids bite.
Biting Due To Overwhelm
The first is one that may provoke our sympathy: toddlers struggle to regulate their frustration, becoming aggressive when they cannot express their needs or wants with words. In these cases, it’s an overwhelmed problem more than anything else.
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In the nervous system, kids are more likely to bite when they are experiencing either aggressive arousal or reactive defense. In other words, when the fight or flight response in the sympathetic nervous system is triggered. Over recent decades of research on the autonomic nervous system, we’ve learned that fight or flight can be triggered by a number of things that might seem innocuous. A trigger can be as simple as the people around you being irritable, or deep rumbling noise as from construction equipment. Fight or flight can also be triggered by not feeling well in your body, through a process in the nervous system called enteroception. In kids, even simple overstimulation can lead to biting, often by triggers adults don’t notice.
Biting For Fun
The second normal reason kids bite is due to their developmental need to experiment with action and consequence. In this case, toddlers may bite without provocation, simply to see what happens. In a 2015 paper, researchers reported that a large percentage of the time, infants who did not seem upset or distressed engaged in unprovoked acts of aggression. These same infants were also higher in “pleasure-proneness,” meaning they spent more time doing things that made them feel happy. And few things make toddlers feel happier than eliciting a response to something they do, like when they bang a toy and it makes a cool noise.
Some Kids Are More Aggressive Than Others
While violence is normal in toddlers and close to universal, some kids are more aggressive than others. Researchers have found that about 42% of young children are more aggressive than their peers.
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