hitting smaller children

Hi Miss Faith,

First, congratulations. I hope you and your partner had a great honeymoon. I didn't change my last name until I was 3 years into marriage (I didn't think I ever was going to change it, but had a change of heart).

               In any case, we're having challenges with my 2 1/2 year old being physically aggressive with her peers. Sometimes it's 'out of nowhere' which makes it all the more baffling. In other words, I understand more when she grabs, pushes, pinches, etc. to get something, but am worried about where it's coming from (even when the cause is evident). She doesn't do this with older children (even slightly older). She is very verbal (and did this before she was verbal - I saw your post about that) and has always been on the higher energy side. She didn't do any of it this summer (despite ample opportunity) but now has started up again, even pushing babies down, etc.! Any tips or insight is appreciated!

                                                                       -Jennifer

Hi Jennifer,

              While most toddlers love 'babies,' I have had several children who were naturally aggressive to children who were smaller than they were, and their moms (and I) had to work extra hard with those children as they learned impulse control.  My heart goes out to you!  Don’t worry too much about “where this is coming from.”  She is not destined to grow up to be a bully, and nor is it necessarily a commentary on your parenting.  I firmly believe that some children come into the world timid, and some come in with guns blazing; it’s our role as parents and caregivers to help all of them learn behavior skills that will serve them well as they interact with others.  That being said, it’s worth asking the basic questions:  Does she have a regular routine and consistent boundaries so that she knows what is coming up next and what’s expected?  Does she have a nurturing home environment (you aren’t remodeling your house, are you?) and get lots of loving attention from you (no new baby in the family)?  If these things aren’t as strong as they could be, then do put some attention into them.  

               My main long-term suggestion is to help your little girl develop the virtue of Empathy.  2 ½ is a great age to start working on this, as it’s the age when children first start to really be able to live in to someone else’s experiences.  Here are a few ways you can help her as she begins this process:

Start Noticing Others

               Start noticing out loud how other children are expressing their feelings, and start a conversation with your daughter about what they might want/need.  I find it’s more useful for kids if I describe their feelings through actions, rather than simply labeling “he’s sad” or “he’s angry.”  So, in the grocery store you might say, “Look, that little boy is so loud!  He threw that box of cereal!  What do you think he wishes?  Maybe he wishes that they were done shopping.”  Then imagine what could help:  “I bet he could really use some hugs and kisses from his mom right now.”  This type of noticing can help your daughter start feeling empathy.  With children that your daughter knows, you might make some suggestions about how you two might help.  Say you see a little boy crying at drop-off time at their play-group or the gym childcare.  “Look, Liam is crying.  He’s pulling on his mom.  I bet he wishes his mom could stay.”  Then, make a suggestion of how you two might help:  “Do you think he might like it if we gave him a toy?  What kind of toys does Liam like?”  Then the two of you could help find a toy together, and offer it to Liam.   If Liam takes the toy and likes it, you can celebrate your success with your daughter with a joyful smile.  If he doesn’t want it, you might say, “We wanted to help Liam be happy by giving him a toy, but he wasn’t ready to be happy yet.  Maybe we can play with him later.”  The next step is to help her relate his experience with her own (but don’t be too heavy with this):  “Are you sometimes sad when I leave you with the babysitter?”

Help Your Daughter Notice How Others React to Her

               Also start noticing out loud how children are responding to your daughter’s interactions with them, and you can even speak for those children if they’re not very verbal yet.  If your daughter is approaching someone smaller who she has hurt in the past, watch how they react:  “Oh, Tina’s turning away.  She’s saying, ‘please touch me gently.’”  If she does touch Tina gently, you might say, “Look!  She’s smiling!  She likes how you’re touching her!”  If she touches Tina and Tina flinches and pulls away, you could say, “Tina’s saying, ‘please stop.’  I don’t think she wants even gentle touches today.  Maybe you could try finding a toy for her, instead.” I use this type of noticing at Rainbow Bridge all the time, and it’s quite effective in helping children learn to notice the effects of their actions.  Also, when I ‘speak’ for the smaller child in this way, when that child starts to talk, he or she will often use the words that I’ve been using for all that time, instead of simply shrieking (an added bonus!).

A Special Doll

          Dolls can play a real and vital role for children as they process what they’ve experienced, and experience new roles in fantasy.  I can often tell what’s going on at home by how children interact with our dolls:  a girl with a colicky baby at home paced the playroom with the baby doll for a full 20 minutes, shushing her lovingly.  Another little girl gave the doll many Time Outs. Get a special baby doll for your daughter, and make this baby really come alive.  Introduce her with a special name, and hold her like you’d hold a real baby.  Teach your daughter how to hold her, how to care for her.  Treat her as much like a real baby as you can.  Attribute feelings to her.  If you see her on the floor, say “Oh no!  Baby Rosie has fallen down!  She’s crying!”  Run over and scoop Baby Rosie off the floor, saying, “Don’t cry!  I’ll give you hugs and kisses!”  Pat her like you would a real baby, then pass her over to your daughter, saying, “I think she’d like some hugs from you, too.”  Make putting Baby Rosie to bed part of your daughter’s bedtime ritual, where she can tuck her in and give her a kiss.

               Books or stories that you make up can also be very useful.  I often make up ‘teaching stories’ for children about woodland creatures who are experiencing what the children are going through.  So in this case, since we’re working on empathy, it might be a little boy chipmunk who had a friend who was rough with him, and while he wanted to see his friend, he was scared he’d get hurt, and he stopped wanting his friend to come over anymore.  I NEVER compare the story out loud to what’s happening in real life; the children simply soak it in.

Set Her Up for Success

               Helping your daughter start to develop her sense of empathy is a longer-term solution to your problem.  By the time she’s three I bet you’ll see a marked improvement, and by 3 ½ it should hopefully be gone (although it may come back in times of stress).  In the meantime, do your best to put your daughter in situations where she can thrive and develop healthy patterns.  Limit her interactions with smaller children as much as is practical for the next few months.  Make a conscious effort to arrange play-dates with children who are slightly older than her for the next few months (2 ½ year-olds often LOVE four-year-olds).  If you’re going to be with a family who has a littler child she has hurt in the past, perhaps bring your daughter’s new doll along with you, for her to nurture.  And stay right on top of her as she interacts with any child who is littler than she is, helping her see if they’re liking what she’s doing.

          Another piece of setting her up for success is to step things up a notch.  I've noticed that many children at two-and-a-half suddenly need More than they were getting before:  more structured activities (trips to the zoo or the creek, crafts, baking), more exercise (races, climbing, jumping), more expectations of helping, and more appreciation for showing the skills she's developed when she does help.  If they don't get this More that they crave, they have trouble.  And hang in there!  You’ve got a strong-willed little girl on your hands, but an empathetic, respectful, strong-willed girl will be a pleasure to be around for the rest of her life.  So help her develop these virtues.

Warmly,

Miss Faith

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Pre-Verbal Hitting

Hey Miss Faith, I was wondering if you could write more on hitting.
          Our pre-verbal 15 mo is going through a rough phase this past month. He hits me and my husband in the face, throws things at us and the dog, pulls the cats by their tails and bops the goats on the nose. He's just being too rough with everyone. 
          We've tried reminding and showing him how to use "gentle hands," and here lately we've been yelling, "No, we don't hit!" but that doesn't help either. My husband is getting really frustrated as this behavior continues and increases, and he wants me to start smacking him on the hand but that just seems antithetical to all my parenting philosophies.
          Just seems hard for us to communicate the ideas to him... maybe it seems harder because he doesn't yet talk himself.

Hi Mama, 

In my experience, there are often two ‘rough phases’ with pre-verbal kids.  The first often comes shortly after becoming steady on their feet; the other one often happens right before a child is about to start speaking.

ROUGHNESS AFTER LEARNING TO WALK

So, your little guy learns to walk.  At first, this is a great accomplishment on its own, and it takes all of his concentration.  But then, he has mastered it!  At this point, many kids go through a ‘rough’ phase.  In my mind, I think of it as them realizing that they are big and powerful in the world!  They are exulting in their new-found strength, and in the new-found freedom to use their arms for grabbing or flailing instead of for crawling.  At this stage, I often see kids hitting, or grabbing hair, poking eyes, or biting for the first time.  They are experiencing this new freedom from the inside, and they have no idea that these fabulous new movements are actually hurting other people, or the cat, or whatever else they come into contact with.  This idea that they have to observe how their actions are affecting other people, and moderate them, is totally foreign.  Up until this point in their lives, their actions have never had this effect on people before.  So, we have to teach them to moderate their actions. 

Because this is brand-new, it certainly won’t happen overnight.  That's where we, as parents and caregivers, have to pull on our inner reserves.  Just be as patient as you can, and remember that this is a new skill and a new idea, and will take many, many times of practicing before it becomes an internal process for him.  Yelling as a general strategy doesn’t seem to help to speed up the process, although if a child really hurts you (through a hard bite, or a head-butt in the larynx, for example), then a big reaction is warrented.  But that should be saved for infrequent safety-related moments.  In general, remember that children learn through repetition, and through imitation.  Don’t just say “gentle hands,” as that has little meaning.  Instead, say “gentle hands,” and help him stroke the kitty, or stroke your leg, or stroke the neighbor girl’s arm.  "Yes, that's it!  You're touching with gentle hands!"  If you re-direct his actions into stroking with his ‘gentle hands’ EVERY SINGLE TIME he is too rough, here’s what may well happen:  First, you do it about a hundred times.  After a couple of weeks, you’ll be able to say “gentle hands,” and some of the time he’ll start stroking on his own, without you physically helping him to do it.  You give him lots of love when he does that.  About 4 weeks in, he might start going over to the cat, or to the neighbor girl, and he’ll look directly at you, and very deliberately stroke her, without any prompting from you.  You go crazy with joy, because this is the beginning of a new era!  You still have to remind him (and help him) to touch gently a lot of the time, but he knows how to do it, and even thinks about doing it on his own.  He is proud of his accomplishment, and you are too.

ROUGHNESS BEFORE LEARNING TO SPEAK

The second time I’ve noticed that it’s fairly common for pre-verbal children to become aggressive is right before they start to speak.  It seems to me that there is a process where a child becomes very frustrated that others can’t understand him, and then there’s a kind of break-through, and when they start speaking, things tend to even out.  When this phase is going on, it can be very useful to give the child the words he will soon be using (you hope!).  So, you see the neighbor girl accidentally bump into your little boy, and your boy turns around and hits her.  Instead of saying, “No hitting!” or, “We don’t hit,” (or even "gentle hands,") try saying what he wishes he could say:  “You’re saying, ‘Please don’t bump me!’”  If the neighbor girl is crying, I would go over to her and give her a hug, saying “Oh no!  Are you alright?  That was too rough, wasn’t it?  I think he was trying to say, ‘Please don’t bump me!’”  Being a Translator for your little guy can help smooth out this time, and when those words come, he’ll know how to say what he’s wanting to express.

And last thoughts:  this time when they're learning to moderate their impulses can be trying for everyone, so don't forget to enjoy one another as much as you can!  Whenever you are stepping up the 'discipline,' it's important to step up displays of love by an equal amount.

Warmly,

Faith

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