Sound Off on Biting

04/27/2005

"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?"

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