How to stop biting and hitting?

Posted in Biting and hitting
by Alicia Castelli

When my oldest child, Ryan, was around 2, he started hitting.

My husband, Dan, and I were not sure how to deal with this beyond firmly telling him “no” and putting him in time out. It had no effect.

If he got mad, he lashed out and even began hitting us. It had to stop, but I just couldn’t see telling him that hitting was wrong and then spanking him or smacking his hand. Seemed like a terribly mixed message to me.

Then I had one of those days. I was a stay-at-home mom at this time, and my husband was working 12-hour days. I was stressed, to say the least, and there wasn’t a moms’ group where I lived, so I was fairly isolated as well.

Ryan had been fussy all day, and he’d stopped napping in the afternoons, so that small break was gone. The house was messy, the laundry was piling up, and I’d started dinner, only to realize halfway through that I was missing a key ingredient. So I was in a hurry to get to the grocery store and wasn’t very patient with the “I want to do it myself” stage Ryan was going through.

He wanted to climb into his car seat “myself,” and since I was in a rush, I just lifted him in. He started a tantrum that I ignored until he hit me. In the face. Hard.

My father had recommended giving Ryan a light smack to show him that hitting hurt. I was strongly against this. I’d never laid so much as a finger on Ryan. I was a time-out mom all the way.

Until this day.

I smacked him back on his cheek. There was this moment of stunned silence, and the look on my son’s face I will carry with me until the day I die. If a 2-year-old can look betrayed and horrified at the same time, my son achieved it that day. I will also always remember his face crumpling into tears as he cried, “No Mommy, no Mommy!” over and over again. I told him, “Hitting hurts – don’t do it” very firmly and shut the car door.

I took several long moments before I got in because I was fighting back tears at this point. I felt like such a failure. Ryan never hit again (until his brother came along, but that’s a whole different story) but I still wonder if I did the right thing that day.

True, the hitting stopped, but at what cost? Our second son never went through the hitting/biting phase, but our 2-year-old daughter is going through it right now. I’m handling it strictly with time-outs, which seem to work with her.

It’s funny how different each child is and how one method will work great with one child but have no effect on another.

How did you deal with a toddler going through the hitting/biting phase?