How to handle a 1.5 year old when hitting?

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Hi,
<br><br>Our 17 month old has started hitting, we don’t believe in physical discipline. Any tips other parents would recommend?
<br><br>We currently tell him “no hitting”, “hitting hurts”, and he kind of gets it. But sometimes clearly that doesn’t help much…particularly when he’s frustrated.
<br><br>Any tips?

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  • you’re on the right track in understanding that he’s frustrated. my viewpoint is that the frustration really comes about in not being able to communicate what he wants to person being hit. the hitting action then becomes his only recourse because he sees that it gets your attention.

    something my daughter’s preschool does is a time-with versus a time-out and i found better results with my 3 year old. the first thing discussed is having her empathize with the other person by going beyong the “hitting hurts” and asking her “how do you think hitting makes her feel?” the second thing we do is get her to communicate her frustration is words rather than action, helping her along the way with getting the words right.
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  • I believe that a 17 month old toddler understand everything that we say to him/her. Therefore we use the follow method:

    First we explain why it is not allowed.

    Then we warn him/her that the next time you do that you will seat near the wall (“Time out”) until we will call you.

    When the next time comes- we seat them near the wall, close to us. (The time out is calculated as follow- for every year of age, he gets 1 minute near the wall)

    We make sure that we don’t look at him/her during the event, and if they try to get up, we seat them back and remind them why they are in a “time out”.

    After the time has past, we go and remind them again what they did was wrong, then we ask them “do you promise not to hit again?”. ONLY when they say that they will not do it again we let them get up, huge them kiss them and let them know that we love them.

    I cannot say that it works all the times. But for the long term it works.

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