Empowering Parents: How to Prevent Biting
What are some tips to prevent biting?
The best strategies to decrease/eliminate biting are:
- Prevention
- Providing sensory input to decrease the “need to bite”.
For prevention, it is important to teach your child to “wait their turn” when playing with others. If a toy is the problem, you may want to have two of the same toy. Or if that is not a feasible option, you will want to re-direct one child to toy A and let the other child play with toy B. Then they can switch. It would help to have a verbal ritual for this, such as: Sarah’s turn to play with the truck and Beth’s turn to play with the doll. Once they get used to the words, they will learn to wait their turn.
Kids also may bite if something accidentally touches their face or crosses their midline. Children often reach in front of other children to get a desired toy, and when their arm crosses midline, it may lead to biting. If you can be mindful of positioning kids while they are playing, this will decrease.
As for sensory, providing chewy necklaces or a toy that your child can hold in their mouth and bite on can decrease biting problems.