Action to Take for Biting?

nearly word for word that is my son as well. he started at 10 months. not aggressive just excited. my parents said i did the same thing. I pull my son away and tell him to be gentle. I tell him i will not play with him if he hurts me. he has fewer and fewer occurrences as time goes on (he is 16 months now) he has gotten 2 time outs for angry biting (both of them to me and both leaving bruises) He is trying to communicate and learning by example. I realized it after the first few times my son bit it was because of how we played with him, when we tickle him or "get him" to blubber him he thought of it as a bite so when he recreates the action he bites hard not meaning to cause harm but meaning to play. When he does it out of anger it is because he has already been told that it hurts it is all he knows to react that way. We keep reminding my son to be gentle and so far it work has worked out. when ever we thought my son was going to bite we would say "kisses nice kisses" and he would calm down enough to only give a kiss and no bite

Our two year old has bitten 4 times now and they have seemed to have been out of excitement than aggression. As I have talked to some older women who have had children who bit, the one thing that kept coming up was bite her back. I was shocked when I heard this because when she bit me the chest, I thought about biting her back but did not do it. Of course, the women did not bite back hard but the child got the idea that it does hurt. I know there are differing thoughts on this because you don't want to confuse the child by biting them. But after hearing from 5-6 women that this works and their kid stopped, I might give it a try.

My daughter went through a biting stage when she was about this same age. We put a dab of dish soap on our finger and wiped it around in her mouth. This seemed to stop to biting in about two days. I have also known other parents who have used vinegar or hot sauce. Good Luck!

A.
This sounds horrible and will hurt you a little, but bite him back. He will NOT like that you did it to him, and it should start to sink in. You don't have to bite hard...just enough to send the message. If you choose not to do this, understood. My nephew is a biter and this is what my brother finally had to do. Some people have given the child a "bite" toy that they can bite to vent. Perhaps this will work as well. Good luck!
Christa

When this happened with my children, our daycare--people whom I trusted with my child more than I trusted myself--suggested NOT showing him how much it hurt until he was old enough to understand. Another thing that we looked at was the fact that when we were playing, we often "nibbled" on our "baby"--we'd kiss him and and chase him in our play, moving our mouth (ok, writing that makes it sound creepy. It wasn't.) Anyway--in our house, playing and kissing and roughhousing had always been something we'd done with him; we wondered if maybe we had taught him that mouthing people was ok--and he was too little to know the difference between mouthing and play and biting. So we stopped that kind of play. At our daycare, they removed our son from the play he was doing and had him do puzzles separate from the group. I'd say my son bit quite a bit; my second doesn't bite quite as much, but he's only 21 months, so it may still be coming. My son bit so much that he got really good at puzzles, and he bit for years--like 2, maybe? We found that removal from the group was a good deterrent, but more importantly, he needed to know that he was hurting others. Anyway--I think it's completely normal; by the time he's 2 1/2, he should be done with it...that's a long haul, though...

Edit: Oh, and my son seemed to bite out of affection--he bit one girl most frequently, the one who was his age and with whom he played the most frequently. It was definitely not mean-spirited, at least not at first.