facial tics and other nervous habits.

[quickdrawnandquartered]

DD is constantly twitching her nose (think I Dream Of Jeanie)
She might do it once every couple of seconds.

She also bites the skin around her nails constantly if she's nervous. This she does in an 'all out' way. Shoulders hunched, one hand in mouth, the other hand pushing the first hand against her teeth.

She always been quite shy of certain situations but is gradually getting better as she gets older. The tics and finger biting however don't seem to be stopping.

no amount of bribery, telling her not to, etc seem to make the slightest bit of difference.

Should i just stop trying to tell her not to and let her grow out if it herself?

meant to say...she's 8

The advice on tics is certainly to ignore them, as making an issue of them tends to make them worse, or result in them being replaced by even more obvious tics. It's very hard to, though, I know - my son, who is only 4.5 years old, has a whole range of facial grimaces and eye rolling, which are particularly noticeable when he's in a stressful situation, but not too bad the rest of the time. If it continues and your daughter starts getting teased about it, I think there are relaxation therapies and other techniques that can be tried, but they don't tend to get rid of the tics, just enable them to become more manageable. 8 is an extremely common age to have tics (quite a few of her class are bound to have similar tics) - they often appear at around 7 and peak at about 10, then tail off in adolescence, unless you're very unlucky!

I bit my fingernails (and the skin around them) when I was younger. Absolutely nothing was going to stop me doing that, and I carried on doing it until I was in my teens, then occasionally when particularly stressed, into my early 20s - at which point I made a very conscious effort to stop doing it. I can't see the appeal of it, now, but didn't see that it was anybody else's business what I did with my nails when I was younger...

asteamedpoater - That is such a relief to hear! ok, I'll back off so.
I was also a nail biter and didn't stop till I was 20 so who am I to talk

Hi there, my dd (5) bites the skin around her nails when she is nervous. We have managed to get her to stop through bribery!

She also used to pull her hair out, which was truly awful - she started to have little bald patches. Thankfully, that was just a stage which - touch wood- she has grown out of.