Why Is My Toddler Hitting (and how can I make them stop)?
You’re the parent of a toddler and all of a sudden they are hitting, pushing, screaming, biting, etc. You don’t know where they learned it from because you certainly didn’t teach them that. You want to know how to make them stop, and how to do it quickly.
The thing that many parents and child behavior coaches get wrong about aggressive behavior, is they look at the behavior as the sole problem and direct all of their tips and tricks at that behavior. In reality, behavior is a symptom of something else underneath. Sure, hitting isn’t fun to deal with, and we don’t want to just “let it” happen, but when we target our focus and interventions only at the behavior, we miss a huge piece of what is actually lying below the surface.
The reason behavior like this seems to suddenly arise in toddlerhood is because it is linked to brain development. In the first 5 years of life, your child is going through a massive period of brain growth. Their brain is making more connections than it ever will in its entire lifetime, and, the brain is actively working to adapt to its surrounding environment and make itself more effective by also pruning connections that aren’t frequently used. This rapid period of development means a lot of the brain under-construction. Toddlers do not have full access to skills like emotion regulation, impulse control, and logical thinking. This is the perfect recipe for behaviors like hitting, pushing, biting, etc.
Toddlers are also going through a period of social-emotional development where they have developmental tasks like learning how to assert themselves, understanding that their wants and needs are different than those of others (primarily their parents), and developing an independent self-construct. Since young children still have limited verbal capacities (even if they talk a lot, it’s another skill to connect inner, emotional experiences to language and express it), their messages often come out in their behavior. That’s why we say: Behavior is communication. Although it’s not the safest, most appropriate behavior, hitting and yelling certainly can get a point across.
On top of these developmental factors that play a role in hitting, biting, pushing, yelling, etc, there are a variety of other puzzle pieces that also factor in. It gets even more confusing because it’s often more than one thing happening at the same time.
When considering why your toddler is hitting, we also have to think about:
their underlying dysregulation
their sensory needs
their communication needs
their relational needs
their environment and modeling by caregivers/important adults
their temperament traits
their caregivers’ response to stress and dysregulation
If we only focus on the surface-level behavior (hitting, kicking, pushing, yelling) and do things like ignore our children or isolate them away in time-out, then we miss the entire list we just discussed above. We aren’t just ignoring the behavior, we are ignoring their dysregulation, their communication, their potential sensory needs, etc.
Now you may be thinking, Okay, so what am I supposed to do? Nothing? Just wait for them to get out of this developmental stage?
Absolutely not! In fact, the way we respond to these behaviors is a great opportunity for us to strengthen our connection with our children and teach them important skills like emotion regulation, communication, and impulse control in the process.
Here are some of the areas that are most important for parents to start and focus on:
Get to know your child’s earlier cues of dysregulation.
It may seem like your child’s behavior always goes from 0-60 (and perhaps sometimes it does), but, there are often earlier cues that get missed that lead to the bigger, more unsafe behaviors like hitting, kicking, etc. When we start to observe and get more familiar with earlier cues, we can intervene before the behavior gets big and therefore mitigate the behavior more effectively. These earlier cues may be behaviors like: giggling excessively, higher volume of voice, quicker, shallow breathing, bumping and crashing into things, getting extra “silly,” etc.
Learn how to self-regulate so you can co-regulate.
Your child’s nervous system is still maturing, which means they need a lot of help from you to regulate through overwhelming emotional experiences. The key to helping your child regulate (also called co-regulation), is a regulated (enough) caregiver. If every time your child gets aggressive, you respond by being bigger, louder, and scarier than them, or, disconnecting and shutting down, you are adding fuel to the fire instead of helping to put the fire out.
Think deeper about what your child is trying to communicate.
It’s easy to get stuck in surface-level thinking and look at your child’s hitting behavior and conclude that they are just behaving badly on purpose. It’s a lot harder to pause and think about what else could be underlying this behavior. When you’re out of the heat of the moment, it can be helpful to take a moment to reflect. What was your child trying to communicate to you with their behavior? Did they hit their baby sibling who tried to come into their play space? Maybe they were saying, “I need my own space to explore and play, please help me.” Did they hit you after you told them you couldn’t have something they wanted? Maybe they were saying, “This disappointment is too overwhelming for me. I need you to help me regulate and set boundaries to keep us safe.” Assuming that there is more going on beneath the surface is automatically going to put you in a more connected place with your little one.
Set developmentally-appropriate boundaries.
It’s your job to keep your child safe and keep others safe from their behavior. This is where boundaries come in. For some parents, it can be really difficult to set boundaries. Boundaries require a balance between a limit set with emotional attunement. In addition to that, one of the most crucial things that parents may leave out of their boundaries is their own follow-through. Since our little ones have under-developed brains, leaving them without skills like impulse control and emotion-regulation, we cannot just make a request over and over and expect that to serve as a boundary. As parents, it’s our job to step-up and follow-through, which may mean removing them from a situation briefly to prioritize co-regulation.
If you want more in-depth, step-by-step guidance on how to implement these ideas in your daily parenting, I’ve got you! The Guide to Aggression in Young Children does exactly that. Click here to grab it.
A developmentally aligned, attachment-focused guide that helps you get to the root of your child’s aggression while keeping you deeply connected. Click here to learn more.
