19 month old biting, hitting and scratching every day - give me strength!!!

[SqueakyBroomstickBrushes]

She's otherwise cute as a button but has a very perplexing side whereby she bites, hits scratches and otherwise mauls both me and her father on a daily basis.

She always does this with a smile on her face and seemingly no recollection of the hundred thousand tellings-off she's received about her behaviour. I just feel as if our approach of 'No biting; biting hurts people' and the stern tone of voice we adopt and serious manner just aren't getting through to her, for reasons I just can't fathom.

Do you think she could have some underlying behavioural/ psychological problem that's so far gone undetected? after 6-8 months of thinking 'it's just a phase...she'll go out of it' i'm seriously starting to worry there's something wrong.

[Lazarou]

They all do it with a smile on their face, lol. Seriously, if you are concerned speak to your health visitor. She's still a baby so you can only really firmly say no, and put her on the floor or the sofa when she starts doing it and then ignore her if she protests. Ignoring is better than telling off imo.

[dreamingofsleep]

Snap! My son is 18mths and has been nipping and slapping both myself and my husband for the past 6 months.

Playgroup is an endless string of apologies to his victims and there mothers!

We also have the issue that he just doesn't seem to be deterred by my stern voice and disappointed looks often he jsut seems to laugh as if its a game or he cries?!

I like to think that its linked to attention and play when its aimed at me and also adapting to interaction with other children - I have just read the development section on this website which mentions this briefly... I reaaly don't think we need to send them to a 'shrink' just yet

[SqueakyBroomstickBrushes]

thanks dreamingofsleep, at least i'm not the only one. the word autism keeps creeping into my mind. but she can't be, surely? she's always been very sociable, and happy. but why doesn't she understand the difference between doing something nice to someone like hugging them and doing something horrible like biting them? is it just her age?

i've made myself worry more, as i just clicked on to the national autism website adn teh first thing i saw was a quote from another mum saying 'he'd give you lovely hugs but then he'd bite you', which set the alarm bells ringing

[beautifulgirls]

Our DD#2 (now 19mth) went through a phase of this a while back. We started to move her fingers/face away with a firm "no hitting, it's not nice" and then encourage her to tickle us. When she did we would very much over-react to it, laughing and giving her the attention response she was looking for when hitting. She more or less stopped doing it pretty quickly once we cottoned onto the tickle idea. In a more rare event we still get the odd incident from her but it is usually easy now to distract her across to a more acceptable behaviour.

[Yummers]

good idea- will definitely try the tickling thing.