Indiana Babies
Options
When will the biting stop?
She got bitten again today at daycare. That makes 7 times this month. Grr!
Warning
No formatter is installed for the format bbhtml
This discussion has been closed.
Re: When will the biting stop?
Aw poor girl! Is it the same kid or is she sweet as sugar and they all need a taste??
Kaylee just learned "be nice" yesterday. (big bro was playing too rough)
I totally get all of this. DD has bitten once herself. But 7 times in one month is getting ridiculous considering they know who the biters are and my daughter isn't the only one getting bitten. And there were more times last month that she was bitten as well. They don't do anything to the child who is biting at all....no scolding, no one minute time out, nothing. Last week, she was bitten twice in one day and only one of the bites was documented. That's kind of frustrating. The solution they have come up with is to try to give the kids their pacis more during the day. That's not super comforting. I know kids go through phases, but this is lasting a lot longer than it should and I'm getting tired of my kid having bite marks all over her body every time I take her out.
This all really sucks and I feel for you. I don't know how things are at your dc, but I once worked as a teacher in a toddler room and it is hard. I was alone all day with 4-5 kids between the ages of 10 months and 17 months. We never had biting issues, but there was pushing,hitting, toy stealing, and one boy who liked to sit on the other children. I am being completely honest when I say that about 95% of the incidents happened when I had another child on the changing table.
Discipline is extremely hard at this age. They really don't understand what it is or why it's happening, they just know they don't like it. I tried time outs, but it is extremely hard to keep one child seated in time out and manage the other kids at the same time. I only remember two injuries while I was working and neither was inflicted by another child (one fell down and skinned his knee another accidentally hit himself in the face with a toy and busted his lip), but I felt horrible both times.
It really is impossible to to keep your eyes on all the children at all times when they're running in opposite directions. There probably isn't much the parents can do since the kids have probably forgotten about it by the time their parents come to pick them up. It sucks, but I think it's just a phase that a lot of kids go through. You have every right to be upset about it, but they really might be doing their best to keep it from happening.
I hope things get better soon and that Maddy doesn't have to deal with anymore bites.
I am really sorry that this is happening with your daughter, but coming from personal experience, 7 times in one month isn't that much considering my daughter was biting the same kid almost every day for 2-3 weeks straight. About discipline (from the biter's parent's perspective) you REALLY have to catch the biter in the act of doing it. It does them no good to put them in time-out, scold them or anything when the child has probably forgotten that he/she even bit the other child. The discipline will mean nothing. One of the cons of daycare is that there are 4-5 children per teacher, meaning that if a child comes to the teacher and says "Johnny bit me", then all the teacher can really do is talk to the biter about not biting because more than likely it happened a few minutes ago and the biter has moved on. At that point, it's too late to discipline for biting (at least in our experience with Haley it was).
We used to always tell Haley "we don't bite, do we" when she was doing other things. We would bring it up in conversation without her actually doing the act of biting. This seemed to help some, but it really was just a phase. We did offer her paci more often and that really helped because some of the biting was attributed to teething pain. She was also learning a lot of new words at the time and was biting when she was frustrated and didn't know how to express herself. One of the children she would bite was taking her toys and she would bite to get the toy back. I'm definitely NOT saying that your daughter is stealing toys, I'm just telling you what happened in our situation. I guess what I'm saying is that there could be multiple reasons for the other child to be biting. It's not right, but it's not an easily fixable problem. It takes some time and could take multiple different approaches to find out what works. That being said, if you're that uncomfortable with the daycare and how they are handling the situation, then maybe you should look into other daycares? I do know that our daycare handles things similarly to your daycare, so I'm not sure it would be different at other places. I hope that things start getting better for you guys soon.