The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
What to do about hitting? (Mini Episode) #42
This is one of my shorter mini-episodes where I read this weeks Substack article.
We answer here the simple and yet extremely common question "What are we supposed to do when our kid hits us or someone else?"
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What do we do about hitting? Probably the number one question I get is what am I supposed to do when my kid hits? And I get why. The cornerstone of the parenting advice that I give, as evidenced by the title of my book, is that punishment is ineffective in parenting. For most millennial parents, that's all fine and good when it comes to things like bedtime struggles or getting out the door in the morning. Where the rubber hits the road is in those harmful behaviors. What is the alternative to punishment when our kid does something that's not just inconvenient, but actually hurts others? The answer depends a lot on where the behavior is coming from. Unsurprisingly, for those who have read my book or have been reading my work for any amount of time, we have to begin with understanding. Why is it that our kid is hitting? If we don't start with why, we inevitably end up playing some version of behavior management whack-a-mole. As I say in chapter two of my book, in doing this, we become like doctors who are only managing symptoms without treating the underlying cause. The reasons kids hit generally fall into a few categories. It'll be up to you to figure out which of these reasons fits for your kid and apply the appropriate corrective action. Reason one, they literally don't know better. When my just turned one-year-old daughter slaps me across the face while we're playing on the floor and then laughs hysterically at the shocked look on my face, I think most of us know that it's not because she has some secret motive or underlying sociopathic tendency. It's because she literally lacks the brain development and life experience to know any better. Specifically, what's at play here is something that we call theory of mind. Theory of mind, as I talked about extensively in my last podcast episode, is the brain's ability to comprehend that others have a different experience of the world, a different mind. My daughter, who turns one next week, is too young to have any measure of theory of mind, and thus has no ability to comprehend that I am not enjoying being slapped across the face nearly as much as she is enjoying slapping me. What we often forget is that theory of mind doesn't really get going for most kids until they're over the age of two or even three for neurotypical kids, and a lot later for some neurodivergent kids. That means that our hitting interventions for such kids have to be rooted in redirecting, and to some extent conditioning kids to practice alternative, appropriate behaviors. Combine this with the fact that talking, aka verbal expression of one's needs and desires, develops much slower than physical development, aka punching someone in the face to express one's needs or desires, and suddenly you understand why most kids between the ages of one and three go through at least one, if not multiple, hitting phases. Thankfully, the solution for this one is really simple. Solution one, gentle hands. When your child goes to hit, what you're going to do is take their hands and redirect them to soft touch or gentle hands. I wish I could show you physically what I mean here, but literally it's just about holding them, non-aggressively by the hand and lightly rubbing, petting, or touching wherever they were about to hit. Then respond in an extremely positive manner, clapping, cheering, and repeating those words, soft touch or gentle hands the whole time. If you fail to catch it before they swing, that's okay. All you need to do is under-react. Be boring and redirect. That's it. Repeat 20 to 50 times, and the hitting will go away nine out of ten times. Will the hitting come back again? It might. You'll need to keep the same redirection until your child eventually develops theory of mind. Solution 1.5 Building Theory of Mind. John, you might be asking, how can I help my child develop theory of mind and the empathy that comes with it more effectively or quickly? Well, I'm glad that you asked. You absolutely can, and one of the best ways to do that is through reading to kids. Again, I talk about this for an entire podcast episode in the last episode. Reason number two. Kids hit to get what they want. But John, you might be saying, my kid seems to know what they're doing. They hit when they get mad about not getting something that they want. Yes, it's an unfortunate reality that for violence for children often does work. When a younger sibling is trying to compete with an older sibling, or your child desperately wants to communicate how disappointed they are with the boundary that you are holding, sometimes hitting feels like the best option. In these cases, redirecting in the moment doesn't always work. Kids also have a tendency to hit to get your attention. Again, because it usually works. In this way, a kid is not hitting because they're being illogical. Their hitting is, at least in the short term, logically motivated. Our job is to work with them to help them understand that hitting doesn't work in the long term. Solution number two, conversations and consequences. The basic crux of discipline here is helping a child understand and experience the very real consequences of hitting. Usually that happens through an after-the-fact conversation and applicable consequence. Say something like, we don't use our hands to hit because it hurts others and we don't want to hurt others. Or when we hit, it makes others want to stop playing with us. If there's a toy or a turn issue, it might be time to take a break from that toy with a phrase like, I can see that this toy is causing you some big feelings. I'm going to help us take a break from it so no one gets hurt. If the child is hitting in retaliation, I understand. It's not okay that that other kid hit you. We use our words to say stop when we don't like something that someone is doing to us. As you can see, many of these seem on the surface to be the same as traditional parenting or punitive interventions. The difference lies in, one, when we enact the intervention, after the fact, not during the fight, and two, how we communicate it. It may be time to leave the park if our five-year-old keeps scrapping with the other kid over who gets the dump truck, but screaming threats in the moment of dysregulation serves only to harm, not help the situation. One quick note on the attention piece as well. Kids often hit adults when they're needing our attention. Adults will often argue that the way that you should respond to this is by not giving them the attention that they're desiring. My argument, and the argument of most experts these days, is that you should give them the attention before they result or resort to hitting. That way they get their fundamental need, yes, it is a need, for attention met, without feeling like they have to resort to violence to make it happen. If you find yourself not knowing that your child is looking for your attention until they hit, consider that maybe it's time to pay more conscious attention to the way that your child is trying to get your attention before the hitting begins. The same is true for whining. If you want a kid to stop whining, the only way to do that effectively is to give them a reason that they don't need to do it. Reason three, lagging development. There are some kids for whom explosive violent reactions persist into later childhood. Redirection may work in the short term, but the lagging skill here is emotional regulation. Oftentimes these kids are given a diagnosis of a whole host of potential neurological conditions to explain their explosive reactions, from ADHD to ODD, or even to rats. For these kids, there's one simple mantra from Ross Green's book, The Explosive Child, my second favorite parenting book of all time, that I often return to. If these kids could do better, they would do better. Kids who have a developmental delay around emotional regulation are not simply giving their parents a hard time. They're literally experiencing the world without the development to process it effectively. Just like a child with a reading deficit does not simply need to, quote, try harder to read, so too these kids need empathy and tools and not hard-nosed old school command-demand parenting. The solution here, solution three, is practice, practice, practice. For all of these kids, the only way through is, well, through. Usually this looks like learning to identify potential triggers to their explosive reactions and preempting them before the child becomes totally lost in the meltdown. I don't have time to go into too much detail on this, as it could easily be a post, podcast episode, or as Ross demonstrates, an entire book. But suffice it to say that learning anything or building any skill requires repetition and patience. Also, it's important to note that you don't have to fix all of the problems at once. Focus on one thing that's triggering to your child, one place where they're consistently melting down and getting explosive or violent, and try and solve one problem at a time. Those little successes will build into larger successes, building the neural pathways and development necessary to be able to regulate emotions and stop themselves from hitting before you even have to intervene. It will take longer with these kids, but it will still work if you stick to the plan. That's the end of this one for you. I hope this episode helps you parent a little bit better. It helps you become the best version of yourself as a parent. Until next time, I'm John. This has been the whole parent podcast.
