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Sound Off on Biting
April 27, 2005
"Even if you’re
on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there." - Will
Rogers
Sound Off on Biting
Today we are unveiling a new feature on our web site called Sound Off.
This will give you the opportunity to express your views immediately and publicly
on a particular ExchangeEveryDay story. When we carry
a story that we think may generate a valuable discussion, we will give you the
opportunity to click on a link to share your thoughts and to view the thoughts
shared by others. Today we begin with a story on biting.
Mary Eberstadt, in her recent book Home-Alone America: The Hidden Toll
of Day Care, Behavior Drugs, and Other Parent Substitutes (New York:
Sentinel, 2004), attacks "institutional care" for making children
sick, aggressive and unhappy. In looking at the issue of aggression, she
observes...
"Sitting next to me is a stack of advisory literature written for people
who run day care centers or preschools, and apparently one of the most important
thing they must prepare for, to judge by the amount of attention it receives,
is coping with the inevitable occasional outbreak of human biting. According
to any number of authoritative sources, as one preschool publication puts it,
the biting of one baby or toddler by another is 'the earliest and most troublesome
unacceptable behavior in the preschool,' one that 'can sweep through a
preschool like the measles.' Biting is one of the chief reasons that children
are expelled from day care and preschool. An astonishing range of 'strategies'
have been devised for handling the problem, a range that of course also speaks
to its ubiquity. To browse the literature is to learn that many babies
and toddlers in institutional care bite and bite a lot. They bite themselves,
one another, and, of course, teachers and adults, too.
"Why is this fact so remarkable? Because it doesn't happen elsewhere the
way it does in day care.....Day care, at least as ordinary experience suggests,
makes biting and the feelings associated with it more likely....The attention
given to biting in the literature on institutional care is itself a sign of
what boosters deny -- clear evidence that day care is causing aggressive behavior.
"Our skeptical reader might say, 'So what? Maybe biting isn't the
best habit, but all of them will outgrow it. Besides, do any longitudinal
studies show that recidivist biting of other children at the age of two predicts
psychological or academic trouble down the road? No? Well, then,
the problem is solved.'
"But of course, the problem is not solved at all, because our skeptical
reader has asked what for our purpose is the wrong question -- the one about
ends, not means. The right question, the one addressing the over-looked
moral dimension of all this, is: What, after all, is the mental state of a bunch
of babies and toddlers who take up biting as a habit? And we can all figure
out the answer to that without reaching for the social science bookshelf:
These kids aren't happy. They are exhibiting a self-protective animal
instinct, which suggests that they feel unprotected. It is something we
would all understand readily enough if, say, zoo animals were to attack each
other more frequently in their quarters than in the wild. (And, if they
did, we would, of course, deplore it and blame the zoo.) Doesn't that apparent
internal turmoil say something undesirable about how institutional care is experienced
by at least some small children?"
Want to share your views or to read how others reacted to this story?
Go to Sound Off.
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Comments (170)
Displaying 5 of 170 Comments [ View all ]PreSchool U
Pleasant Prairie, Wi, United States
I am in need of some help with this topic as well. I have noticed that these post are about 10 years old and it is still and I think will forever be the most stressful problems daycare centers will have. I have had many biters in my years of teaching and I have hit a rock bottom today. I have a 21 month old child that bites for no reason. We have a policy that states that after biting twice in one day the student is to be sent home. Our ratio it 1 Teacher to 4 children under the age of two. One on One care is not always something that I can always do. This student has no patterns (all times of the day, any child, will remove a passy to bite, thinks its funny). I really need some advice.
Vdbp, Gauteng, South Africa
I dont think biting is caused by day care, my 16 month old son bites his father and me everyday, mostly his father, and he has never seen the inside of a day care. I need to know why this is. He even bites himself sometimes. He is very aggresive aswell. He would walk up to a child and just hit her.
C.A.R.E. Parent Support Program
Byron Bay, New South Wales, Australia
I believe a child/person who is put in a position where he/she feels "controlled" by some outside influence, he/she will use every power he/she has to protect his/her self.
With reference to P5 (Participatory Program Promoting Pleasurable Parenting) designed by New Zealand based psychologist Kate Birch, which considers the misbehaviour of a child has everything to do with what the parent/adult feels and believes. It is not the behaviour of the child that is the problem but the way the parent/adult feels about the behaviour. (the child is merely learning and experimenting to find out what is an effective way to meet his/her own needs).
If the behaviour gets results then of course the child will keep doing it.
In a child care centre environment there is a great deal of pressure on the carers to keep all the children safe. Therefore the reaction the biter receives is quite powerful as the carer has strong feelings and beliefs around what the child is doing, is wrong.
When will we learn the fact that children will learn how to protect themselves from harm if we, as carers, give them the oportunity to FEEL the consequence instead of blaming the child who is learning that biting surely gets a huge reaction?
Many parents who have done P5 share with me the successes they experience by simply allowing sibbling rivalry to occur. The helpless child learns the skill of protecting himself while the child attempting to gain power over the other does not get the intervention he is seeking from the parent/carer. Very quickly the behaviour dissolves.
Pacific Preschool Council/The University of the South Pacific
Suva, Rewa, Fiji
It could be that the children feel 'hemmed in' or their movements are either controlled or restricted in an institution like the Day Care. This can cause undue frustration especially if they enjoy so much freedom at home, so they hit out at others. The Day Care hours may be rather too long for some children as well thus the signs of frustration through biitng and other aggressive behaviour.
Allow more time for children to play outdoors in the fresh air and sunshine.
Dartmouth Hitchcock Medical Center Child Care Center
Lebanon, NH, United States
I agree that biting can be an issue in group care but I believe it is a "problem" that is solved through environmental intervention. Most biting seems to occur in single age groups of two year olds where all the children are at the same developmental level and the frustration levels are high. When the group is arranged differently there is potential to reduce and in many cases eliminate the biting. In our program we use a multi age model for both preschool and infants and toddlers and have found in the five years we have done this that there is virtually no biting. We attribute this to the following: multi age groups, small groups and a staff:child ratio that allows relationships to flourish between children and caregivers. I know that developing an environment that is conducive to positive relationships, trust and feelings of comfort is expensive but we must find ways to make this happen for all of our children, not just the ones who happen to have access to programs who have those resources. It is easy to say that group care creates aggressive children, it is much more difficult to figure out how we make the group care that is essential for working families successful. This kind of rhetoric with no suggestions for what could be done is not productive in my view. It just raises parent's anxiety levels without giving them the information about how it could be better.
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