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8th October 2018
01:30pm BST
"It happened three or four times a day, and always when I least expected it. At the sink when I was washing up lunch, or later when I gave him a cuddle as I was putting him to bed. It always put me into such a rage. It took me months to realise it was the rage he was after – I think he loved the power of being able to make me mad. I tried everything – firm reprimands, time outs, etc, but nothing worked until the day I decided to act disinterested. It took a few goes – the bites hurt so much – but I would look away and get on with whatever I was doing and within a few days it had stopped. I couldn’t believe it."2. Sarah, 39
"I was surprised at how much it hurt and the bruising afterwards was awful. Then my childminder suggested I put Marmite on my shoulder. At first I laughed but when he started biting the bruises– absolute agony – I decided to smear the shoulder he was most fond of and see what happened. He bite into it, gagged, and that was the end of it. Never again."3. Nicola, 36
"I was horrified when my son started biting me. I treated it as a discipline issue – issuing a firm "no" like I did when he hit other people or snatched their toys – but it got worse. Soon he was biting the childminder and other toddlers. I began to dread bringing him anywhere and hovered nervously around him and other children. At playgroups, I could not relax, or talk to other parents. If I thought he was anywhere close to biting someone, I snatched him up and whisked him away. Friends suggested it was teething but he looked so victorious after he did it I wasn’t convinced. It felt like revenge, and I had days when I doubted whether I thought he was a good child. But a few months into it, I was travelling home with him on the dart, and we sat opposite an older woman who had had ten children. "God love him," she said, as she witnessed him trying to bite my finger, the teeth are driving him mad. "Have you a wipe?" She took it, folded it in half, and he gnawed on that for the rest of the journey. After that, I stopped shouting at him and redirected him to a teething ring every time he bit me and within a few weeks, he would go in search of the ring himself making bleating noises when he couldn’t find it. If there's anything I have learnt about mothering, it’s that in the first couple of years you have to rule out the physical before you decide something’s behavioural."4. Carie, 42
"My son was a late talker, and he was about 18 months when the biting started. It went on for months. My neck, collarbone, thighs and stomach were always cut and bruised, and I had begun to tense up every time I tried to cuddle him. I issued stern reprimands but that didn’t work, so I upped the discipline, using punishments and time outs, but that just seemed to make it worse. It came to a head when we went to the States to visit my brother – he bit one of their children, in a moment of frustration over a snatched toy – and my sister-in-law went mad. She seemed to think he was evil, and that our parenting was lousy, and I took the whole thing very hard. When we returned, I could not bring myself to take him anywhere. In the end, when I had lost it with him on several occasions and discovered a side of myself I didn’t like (I thought about biting him back several times), I talked to a child psychologist who encouraged me to think about what feelings my son was experiencing before he bit me. I knew he did it to get my attention, and when he was mad, but after talking to her, I began to understand that it also happened when he was tired, hungry or overwhelmed. She urged me to talk to him about his feelings, which I had never done because I was not sure how much he really understood. "Are you mad," I would ask when he bit me (this took every bit of self-control I had). Or "Mama understands you are very angry," and then I would give him a hug. Acknowledging his feelings changed everything pretty quickly. I learnt a lot from this. I think we are so hung up on disciplining our children – or on being seen to discipline them – that we don’t always tune into them the way they need us to."5. Caroline, 31
"I used the Dr Sears method – when my son bit my husband or me, I took his hand, pressed it into his mouth so he would feel his teeth on his skin. See, I used to say, biting hurts! Now when he wants to bite – it’s a teething thing – he rams his hand into his mouth and looks at me so proudly, as if to say, Look, Mammy, I’m doing it! He never bites down the way he did with me, though – babies are so much cleverer that we think!"Nikki Walsh is a writer and editor with a passion for what makes us tick. She lives in Dublin with her husband, her son and a heap of books, mostly on psychology.
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