Nip That Biting In The Bud!
Careful there, Mike Tyson!
Tonight as I was surfing the Twitters I came across a tweet that got me terribly excited.
You see, my baby is a biter. Oh yes. And I’m not just talking about nursing (has he made me bleed? only once), though thankfully, that’s gotten a lot better.
His favorite maneuver is the “sly shoulder bite” when he’s feeling edgy, and no amount of “No!” can make him stop. I could swear to you I see the devil in his eyes after he’s gotten me, and that crafty little smile, like, “Haaaaah, I am so very clever.”
But maybe I am imagining that?
But this tweet was a game changer for me, even though it was information I’d heard before and probably already knew somewhere but just hadn’t remembered that I knew. If that makes sense.
After the jump, how to stop a biting baby from, well, biting.
Well, it’s no surprise to anybody, but you can’t expect to tell a nine-month-old “No” and have them actually stop. Nine-month-old brains just don’t work that way. But you can “change the channel,” as the linked article says.
Your only goal is to try to distract your son or move out of reach or somehow shift the action so that it is about something else.
Distract, distract, distract! Hey, I can do that! Thanks, Twitter!
How do you stop pinching? That hurts, too!
I found that tapping my son on the mouth and telling him no worked thankfully. He actually bit my mother-in-laws toe so hard that she limped for two days… so we had to do something.
I was a biter when I was a baby…my mom stopped it by biting me back. Honest. Not like hard, obviously, but enough to where it hurt. So that I understood that it hurt when you bit someone. Apparently it worked.
I still swear by picking up my son, telling him “No biting” in a firm voice, putting him down in the next room and walking out. He ran back to me crying about 10 seconds later, and I hugged him and we went back to what we were doing before he bit me. Repeat every time for a few weeks. The problem went away and hasn’t come back. If we were out somewhere, I turned my back on him for a few seconds (he was always in a shopping cart or stroller). This is also a great tantrum-buster now that he’s older; I leave the room and he usually wanders in after a minute or so, wiping his eyes, because you lose all the benefits of a tantrum if there aren’t any witnesses.