Help! My Child Is Biting!

There is something repulsive about biting. Perhaps the thought of being bitten threatens our position on the food chain. Needless to say, parents get upset about children biting, whether their child is bitten or is the biter. It goes without saying that the child being bitten isn't happy. But, the biter isn't happy either.

Biting for two-year olds is a common response to frustration. I call it pre-verbal biting. A two-year-old has a larger listening or receptive vocabulary than spoken or expressive vocabulary. When situations don't go well, all the energy that is trying to form words gets in a major traffic jam in the temporo-mandibular joint next to the ears. The tension builds and, in a blink of the eye, can be released on an unsuspecting arm.

Biting, hitting, kicking, pinching or spitting on others is characteristic of two- and three-year-old children who can't find the words to express themselves. In a preschool situation with this age children, biting can turn into a feeding frenzy. One child bites, and others follow depending on the way the aggressive behavior is handled. If the children perceive that biting or other behavior is effective in getting one's way, getting attention from adults, or expressing frustration, almost overnight a preschool classroom or a family with several siblings can become a chomping ground.

With biting, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. At parent meetings I forewarned parents of how and why biting occurs, and I urged them not to overreact if their child bit or was bitten. I explained our strategy for preventing biting, and how we would handle it. I also noted that even in the best supervised circumstances a biting incident can occur, and that how it is handled will make a difference between one incident or a frenzy of incidents.

Prevention. Every day in our classroom we gave multiple short one-minute lessons, which we call grace and courtesy lessons, on how to use your words to say ''excuse me,'' ''may I please,'' ''sorry,'' ''I'm mad,'' ''I'm frustrated,'' ''I'm hungry,'' or ''I'm thirsty,'' while stressing that we had to use our words to solve our problems.

Cure. When a biting incident occurred, we removed the biter from the classroom and sent the child home immediately with a sad, ''Remember: We must use our words. Tomorrow you can come back to school.'' This sent a strong message to the entire classroom that biting was not acceptable. When we handled biting in this way, we usually only had one biting incident for the entire year in the school. There were some years we had no biting incidents because the four- and five-year-olds were so good at helping the younger children learn to use their words.

Who, what, when, where and why? If a biting incident occurs, take the time to consider when the biting occurred. Who was involved in the incident? What circumstances led up to the incident, and what happened afterward? Sometimes the biting child may have been treated unkindly by another child, so look at each situation carefully. Biting may indicate some stress in the child's life such as divorce, illness, new home, new sibling, new schoolmate, visitors or disrupted eating or sleeping schedule. Helping children daily with spoken language will help them express needs and emotions and avoid offensive conduct.

Parents can feel outraged if their child is bitten and embarrassed if their child is the perpetrator. Parents of the bitten child should know that the incident was dealt with effectively. The parents of the child who bit should be aware that their child is dealing with frustration or stress.

If you have clear expectations for behavior in your classroom or family, and have a clear understanding with other adults of how biting or other aggressive behavior will be handled, these incidents will be short-lived occurrences.

Next week: Asking for Assistance

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

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©2006 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

The Spiritual Role of Family

It's uncomfortable to consider. Some of us would rather not consider it at all.

To our children, we are their first experience of the divine, the all-powerful, the all-knowing, with a human face. We fix ZuZu's petals. We are our children's miracle makers.

Our ability to create can be a double-edged sword by yielding the power to destroy or obstruct our children's development.

Our children come to us as spiritual embryos, beings working to build themselves. From birth, children have an inner life. Human development is a lengthy and internal process—an enigma that produces unpredictable results.

The problem with human development is the fact that the child has a spiritual life, even when he or she cannot express it. Because of the arduousness of this development, growth occurs over a long period of time. A child usually learns to walk by eighteen months of age. The effort the child uses to learn to walk is small compared to the internal work of the spirit.

A spirit is born, hidden in a small body, who little by little learns to exert his or her will in the world. The largest obstacle and the greatest help in the child's new world is the adult who has enormous power.

Like the physical body, the spiritual embryo must be protected in an environment filled with the richness of love and regard for the psychic development of the child.

As the adults, we have three principles that we should follow to protect the spirit of the child:

1. Respect all reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand those activities.

2. We must support as much as possible the child's desires for activity. This doesn't mean that we wait on the child hand and foot, but we encourage activity in order to draw out the child's singular and independent spirit.

3. We must be careful in our relationships with children because they are quite sensitive, more than we know, to external influences.

I'm reminded of the movie, E.T., where three children discover an extra-terrestrial. The children are careful to help E.T. meet his needs and protect him from the adults who would capture, examine, and over-analyze him to death.

Let us observe children's activities and realize that these activities are the manifestations of the spirit within. Our children's activities are clues to their inner workings of spirit. Our children need our help to create an environment in which their spiritual embryos can grow stronger and healthier day by day.

As we observe our children, let us realize that tears, screams, misbehavior, shyness, disobedience, lying, egoism, and destructiveness are defense mechanisms of the child against us and are used as an attempt to gain our help to remove an obstruction to growth.

Children come to us very much as extraterrestrials. We need to remember that children are new souls to this planet. Let us strive to be sensitive to our children's needs, both physical and spiritual.

Next week: Help! My Child Is Biting!

This is the last in a series of columns about seeing from the child’s perspective.

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

Ask your local newspaper to carry Kids Talk. Call, write or e-mail your local newspaper editor and recommend Kids Talk.

Would you like to send Kids Talk to friends and family or receive Kids Talk e-mail updates in your own inbox? Sign up for FREE here:
Click here for a free subscription.

©2006 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing

The Child's Inherent Love of Nature

What do you do to find yourself when you are out of sorts? Frustrated? Sorrowful? Despairing?

If you are like most people, you try to find a quiet spot to commune with nature and seek peace or solace. Solace, a word from the Latin sol for ''sun,'' meaning ''to find the sun.'' We have to be close to nature to find the sun, and in the process we find ourselves.

This connection to peace is formed within each of us as a young child. Humans are born with an innate ability to constructively connect to the world around them using all their senses--seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting.

As infants, we attach ourselves lovingly to items that we see, touch, taste, hear and smell. Think of all the blankets and stuffed toys in the world, doted on for years by their small owners. As every parent knows after a bleary-eyed midnight search for a lost ''blankie,'' a misplaced object of affection can create inconsolable anguish in a child.

Wherever we go in the world, even when security blankets and stuffed animals are left behind, nature is there to comfort us. The sun, the moon and the stars belong to us forever. The wind, the smell of rain, the feel of rocks, dirt and sand, the rustle of trees, the colors of flowers, the shifting forms of clouds, the prickle of grass between our toes—are there wherever we go. The call of a bird, an earthworm or a squirrel running up a tree can help us connect to that peaceful part of us.

These childhood connections to nature remain strong throughout all of our lives. Research shows that as we age, or if we are ill, we regain and maintain health faster in the geographic places where we spent the first six years of our lives.

On a trip to pick apples, my husband called his mother to ask if we could bring her apples. ''I'd love to have some King apples,'' she said. ''We had a King apple tree in our yard when I was a kid.'' Her first choice of apples was the kind that grew in her backyard when she was five years old.

We are meant to connect to our time and place through our love of nature. This connection to the earth creates a way for us to remember who we are and that the beauty of the universe belongs to every one of us on this planet. All we have to do is be.

Even though I have been alive for over 18,000 sunsets, my favorites are the red purple pink big sky ones of my Oklahoma childhood. There is something indescribably comforting in those bold watercolored sundowns.

This love of nature formed in childhood, from apples to sunsets, gives our soul roots. From these roots we sprout wings, carrying us on the adventure of our life.

Have you taken a child on a walk today? Taste the rain, smell the sun, hear the trees, watch the wind and touch a heart.

Next week: The Spiritual Role of Family

This is the ninth in a series of columns about seeing from the child’s perspective.

Kids Talk™ is a column dealing with early childhood development issues written by Maren Stark Schmidt. Mrs. Schmidt founded a Montessori school and holds a Masters of Education from Loyola College in Maryland.

She has over 25 years experience working with young children and holds teaching credentials from the Association Montessori Internationale. She is also Creative Director for a video-based reading series for children ages three to six, The Shining Light Reading Series. Contact her via e-mail at maren@shininglightreading.com.

Complete Collection of the Shining Light Reading Series Now Available on DVD
Visit www.shininglightreading.com for more information.

Ask your local newspaper to carry Kids Talk. Call, write or e-mail your local newspaper editor and recommend Kids Talk.

Would you like to send Kids Talk to friends and family or receive Kids Talk e-mail updates in your own inbox? Sign up for FREE here:
Click here for a free subscription.

©2006 KIDS TALK™
25877 East Bright Avenue
Welches, OR 97067
503.550.3143
maren@kidstalknews.com

Kids Talk is published in conjunction with Scribe Marketing