Positive Guidance: A Pathway to Reduce Biting Behavior

Biting can be a way for young children to express themselves, communicate, and explore their growing world. A common reason for biting includes when young children experience emotions like anger, frustration, or anxiety and do not yet have the words to express themselves. Older infants and toddlers may bite when testing boundaries, expressing their needs, exploring their world, or asserting their newfound independence or autonomy. During this significant time of development, toddlers and 2-year-olds are learning words, how to express themselves, and how to do things independently. These powerful feelings and accompanying developmental changes can sometimes lead to biting

Focus on Positive Guidance

Educators who focus on positive guidance respond rather than react to children. Responsive adults are aware of children's social and emotional needs and development. They do not react to behaviors like biting. Instead, they respond clearly and calmly to children in ways that help them learn alternatives to biting and foster children's understanding of emotions. This responsiveness contributes to safe, nurturing, and caring interactions between children and educators and sets the stage for healthy development and learning. When educators use positive guidance, they support children's learning and development. Positive guidance strategies support a platform for guiding and managing behavior to help children stop biting.

"In emotionally supportive classrooms, teachers foster a climate of respect and communication, thus fostering positive relationships. They limit punitive and negative behaviors while being aware, responsive, and comforting toward children's needs" (Paschall et al., 2023, pg. 3).

Five Strategies to Reduce Biting Behavior

1. Provide, explain, and positively reinforce routines and smooth transitions that are developmentally appropriate for children. When children feel safe in their environment and understand expectations, there are fewer conflicts, including biting behaviors. For young toddlers, this means having predictable routines while allowing flexibility for their developmental needs.
2. Acknowledge and talk with children about what they are doing well to support children's efforts and positive behaviors. Adults who offer specific information to children about what they are doing well contribute to children's positive sense of self and competency. When children feel more in control of what they can do, they are less prone to behaviors like biting. Even with toddlers who do not yet have words to express themselves, adults can narrate what children are doing and why. For example, a toddler teacher tells an 18-month-old, "You hugged Vinnie when he fell. You helped your friend feel better!"
3. Support children's efforts to identify feelings in themselves and others, calm down, and problem-solve. Social-emotional learning (SEL) skills like understanding feelings in oneself and others, being able to self-regulate or calm down, and resolving conflicts with friends develop over time. Educators support infants' and toddlers' understanding of these beginning SEL skills by soothing children who have been bitten and those who have done the biting. Educators can help toddlers verbalize how they felt when someone bit them or when they bit someone. Educators can offer and support alternative strategies to biting, such as helping older twos understand and use words to express their wants and needs.
4. Build relationships with families to support communication and to learn about and better understand a child's experiences that may impact their behaviors. Families are integral to every part of their children's learning. Trusting family-teacher partnerships are built over time and are the cornerstone of supporting children. Ask families about what behaviors they see at home. Develop shared strategies that can support the reduction of biting behaviors at home and school. Educators can also offer resources to help all families learn about biting, the reasons why biting can happen at various ages and stages of development, and how to use preventative strategies to support minimizing occurrences of biting.
5. Respond rather than react. Grow trusting relationships with children. Notice, listen to, and respond to children in ways that meet their needs in the moment. Adults build these caring relationships with children by engaging with children's interests throughout the day. They meet children's needs in socially and emotionally grounded ways and model and reinforce behavior that is responsive and not reactive. When biting occurs, adults who react to children by ignoring or minimizing real distress, making assumptions about a child, or immediately initiating punitive consequences model behavior that does not support children. This type of response may negatively impact children's trust in the adult and contribute to the persistence of biting behaviors

References

Paschall, K. W., Barnett, M. A., Mastergeorge, A. M., Li, X., & Vasquez, M. B. (2023). A new look at teacher interactional quality: Profiles of individual teacher–child relationship and classroom teaching quality among Head Start students. Early Education and Development, 34(5), 1172-1190.