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Unregistered 08:42 PM 08-25-2008
I've been quite reasonable with our daycare and not over-reacting to a few bites here and there. Recently, the same child has biten my son 4 times in one week. I can handle small bites out of frustration, due to not having the appropriate communication skills, but it's when the bites become very severe that I cannot stande idle. When you pick your son up and he has a wound on his arm as if someone put his 1 inch arm in a vice and tightened it until it bled, you start to think differently about allowing the biting child to remain amongst the group. Sure, i'm sorry for the parents of the biter and realize i could have been the parent of child with a behavior issue, and may some day be, but that simply does not change the fact that i have to leave my child every morning in a room where another child is waiting to inflict bodily harm to him. When our son was younger, he began developing certain behaviors that ALL kids do. It's what you do in response to those behaviors in combination with your child's developmental capabilities that will either stop them or fail to. I think I've told my son, "Use your words" (signs before speach developed or even just holding him and making him point at what he wanted - lots of trial and error at very young ages), more than 5,000 times in his short two years. Now that he has developed a strong vocabulary, we do not let him get away with ANYTHING unless he manifests his desires in words. If he cries or even whines in the smallest way, he does not get what he wants until he talks in a normal voice, asks nicely, and says thank you. It has changed everything and he is such a good little boy. Some parents may do this but it must be done all the time and in every situation. It also stimulates language development. Tomorrow, we are going to ask our daycare to make some drastic changes to protect our son. I wish we did not have to but I cannot put my son in harms way each day and just go on to work and be content and wait for someone else to fix things.
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