How to Stop a Child from Hitting You

Let's talk about how to stop your child from hitting you. So I come from a standpoint where I do have a background in aba, so if you're gonna be triggered and think that it's an inhumane way to teach children, then it's okay to click away and think about other things. But I've done this for quite some time now, and I've had quite a lot of success teaching parents how to stop their children from hitting them. And especially for me, like, I only get hit for the first month in therapy as far as it goes. Hopefully I won't break that streak. But at the end of the day, you need to understand what hitting does, right? Well, what's your child trying to do when he or she is hitting you? So, yeah, understand the underlying reason for why. And that's the fundamentals of, you know, behavioral psychology is to understand the reason why you need the underlying thing, the underlying thesis about behavior. Behavioral psychology is that each behavior has its motivation and its motive and so on and so forth. So understanding why your child hits you is the most important thing. So I don't know how your child is like. I don't know how other children are like, unless I analyze what's going on. So you need to do this for yourself. There are some reasons to why children hit. Number one, they cannot express something, and they're pushed to do or say something that they are not comfortable with doing. So that's the number one reason why children hit, in terms of children who are, like, delayed in speech and maybe on the spectrum as well, from what I see, at the very least. So if a child already doesn't have the chops to tell you what they want and express their needs and emotions. And a lot of times what happens is that they feel threatened at that point and they can't do anything about it. They will resort to, like, hitting you to get out of the situation. So it's kind of a frustration release and also escapism, and it becomes a learned behavior. So the second thing about behaviors and these kind of hitting stuff is the moment your child gets to hit something or someone, it already gets reinforced, meaning like, oh, it's working already, so the best way is to prevent it. Right. But we'll get to that later on. The second reason of why children will hit is exactly frustration release. And they're used to it. Just about what I just said, right? So a lot of times, like, when I work with parents in real life, I want the mom or dad to sit inside the room with me and Watch me work, right? And that might be very stress for me and the kid. I don't care. But what happens is when the child fails at something, the instinctual thing is to go up to the mom and pinch and hit her. And that's just because that's the weakest link. And there might be a slight sense of relief from doing that. And that's why we have to prevent that. All right. The third reason is that your child may, might. These are all maybes asking for attention. So sometimes when children hit the parent or people, what happens is that there's a response and the response might be scolding, might be looking very painful, whatever. And sometimes we get these children who hit and look for a response. Right? And that in itself is a more than enough of a motivation for children to hit someone just to see that attention. So it's an attention seeking activity. And there are two types of attention, positive attention and negative attention. Children, sometimes, they don't really care whether it's positive or negative. As long as you look at them and you give them a response, they love it. So that's why at times when a child hits you and you give a response, that in itself might also reinforce that behavior already. So you have to be careful. All right, so the last thing, that's all the three reasons that usually happen in my observation, at the very least. So let's talk about how to get rid of it. So the first thing is we have to prevent it. So whenever a child is very close to you, it's very difficult to stop their hands from hitting you. Right? So when your child is next to you, I want you to know if there's a chance that he or she might hit you and slap you and stuff, already be in the position to guard yourself. And how to do it is basically you put your hand here because if your child is supposed to hit you, he's going to have to raise his hand and he can't put it here to reduce that. That's the place where you want to stop your child at, not when he's already here. And you do that, that's too late because you're not going to be able to catch that because your child's hand is shorter, right? And then they're also a lot shorter than you. So when they attack you, it's so much faster than, you know, a adult whipping out a hand because the distance is further for a kid, their hands are short and therefore they're going to attack you real quick. So these kind of mental preparations, you need to have to prevent. Because if you can block the route that they're going to attack you, then you prevent it. Right. That's the first thing. Second thing is think about what the triggers are. When you know that's going to trigger your child, trying to try to prevent those triggers. And when you do have those triggers, you can't control it. Be sure to distance yourself away from a kid. I know sometimes that's not practical, but if you're really close to your kid, be sure to already start blocking their hands. Because if they're. If your child is able to hit even once, that's already reinforced and they think that's useful and they'll keep on doing it. All right? Okay. So other than preventing, what should you do if the kid already hit you? So the thing about it is we should try to give a neutral response without being overly dramatic. I know sometimes it's out of reflex. Sometimes someone hits you, you go, ow. That might be amusing to the kid. Might. The thing about all this is not to ignore or whatever is to say in a neutral tones, that was not nice. That hurt me. And scolding as well. Like, if you saw that's bad, that's. That's an overreaction as well. So you want to go back, go down to the neutral line and stay there. All right? And why we want to do that is just in case if our reactions actually reinforce and reward. I know it's a little bit crazy to say reward, but it may actually be that way. And you want to limit that risk. That's all. That's what I'm saying. All right? Not telling you to ignore your kid, not telling you to not care about the emotions. Just neutral tone it and go, that was not nice. I did not like it. Right. That's all. Okay, what happens next? The third thing I want you to do after you do those, like prevent prevention and also giving a neutral tone as a feedback, the third thing I want you to do is to reward and praise when the hitting doesn't happen. All right, so how do you even know? Right. So sometimes when a child is triggered, your first word is like, oh, good job. Nice hands. Very good. Oh, you didn't hit mommy. That's very good. Good boy. So you praise and reward before the behavior actually happens, and you give that attention before the hitting actually begins. Then there's a much higher chance that the kid will actually not hit. So sometimes I go as far as when we're dealing with a severe case and we're talking about a child who is on the spectrum, who hits for everything, including if they want something to hit, they don't like something to hit, they're happy, they hit everything they hit. I'm laughing because I'm thinking about all the times I got slapped. I'm telling you, sometimes we go as far as using treats like teaching a little pet a new thing. We trigger them a little bit and if they don't hit, we treat them. That actually works a lot. But we're not going to use it forever. We're going to start thinking about like how to reduce the rewards, how to use it, how to only use verbal praise, how to get rid of those verbal praise, how to teach a child to self regulate, how to reward that self regulation, so on and so forth. It takes a long time. So hopefully you understand the steps at the very least of how to stop a child from hitting you. It doesn't matter if the child is typical developing. It doesn't matter if your child is speech and language slate or on the spectrum or adhd, whatever. The principles are the same as long as you have an open mind. And that we don't go into a philosophical discussion about whether something is naturalistic or tantrum and you know, trauma inducing or whatever. We stick to whatever works so far. And the methods that we use usually does not diminish the relationship between you and your kid and most cases actually helps. All right, so that's it for this video. And if you haven't, Please go to www.agentsofspeech.com course to grab all the free, all the paid courses that we used to sell. It's all now free on our parents community. You can go there and there are lessons to teach a child to go from no words all the way to like sentence building and stuff. So that's it for now. See you guys next week. Bye bye.