Why kids hit (and how to respond when they do)

Kids fight.

Saying that is like saying that the sky is blue, or that water falls from it, or that all of the contestants on “The Bachelor” need to drink more water and less cocktails. It’s just true.

Many times these arguments that kids have are with adults, but they are also with other children. If you live in one of those households where there are multiple children already (as in siblings), then you may have already been forced to stop reading because one of those arguments is happening right now.

If you are in a house like that, reading about kid fights might just be a little too much real life.

Even without a brother or sister in the home, there will be other kids around. Cousins, kids at school, down the street.

They will be there, and chances are good that there will be some kind of disagreement between them at some point.

Disagreements is how lots of conflicts start. Not just with kids, but with...everyone. Two different and probably competing views on how things need to go forward meet in a moment, and, depending on the emotional attachment you had to your particular point of view, it’s natural to defend it.

an example:

Kid 1: “Let’s go play in backyard with the sandbox. I’ll get the big trucks and you can have the cars.”

Kid 2: “I want to play with the big trucks.”

Kid 1: Fuck this shit!

It may not happen like that all the time, but clearly Kid 1 was very invested in playing with those trucks, and things escalated.

When I say escalation, I mean two things that happen at the same time. The first thing is the internal escalation, which can feel like panic, anger, or disappointment, and lead to feeling hurt and an increased commitment to your original idea.

The second thing, the external escalation, is directly connected to the first thing, and follows right behind: things get loud, and can get violent.

Violent might be a word that bring up some very specific connotations for you. When you think of “violent,” you might think of violent war movies, or horror films. Things with lots of blood and death.

BOTH VERBAL AND PHYSICAL AGGRESSION COME FROM A DESIRE TO GET WHAT YOU WANT, AND TO COMMUNICATE THE EXTREME LEVEL OF UNHAPPINESS AND POWERLESSNESS THAT YOU FEEL WHEN THINGS ARE NOT GOING THE WAY YOU WANT.

When I use “violent,” I’m talking about physical aggression. Hitting, biting, pushing, kicking, etc.

Verbal aggression is its own kind of violence, and it’s not too different.

Both kinds usually come from a desire to get what you want, and to communicate the extreme level of unhappiness and powerlessness that you feel when things are not going the way you want.

Sometimes, with young kids, it may seem from the outside that aggression is merely the external things you can see; hitting, pushing, biting, etc., but don’t forget about the communication that is also taking place. You are getting information about the internal experience of each kid by watching what they do.

Let’s use taking something that does not belong to them as an example. At least in my house, it does not matter what the stolen object is, but when it is discovered to be stolen or moved even a fraction of an inch from where it was left, well…hell hath no fury like a child whose baby doll has been touched.

The escalation can be almost instantaneous, and some kind of aggression is probably not too far away.

As parents, we hate arguments and the escalation that usually follows. We hate it for lots of reasons. For starters, being around other people arguing is just annoying. It’s stressful, loud, and from our point of view, it’s over things that are really hard to care about.

Did your baby doll get chopped into pieces? No? Just touched? Just touched accidentally by your sister while you were both playing with baby dolls in some kind of elaborate pretend dinosaur daycare scenario?

Start yelling when there’s blood. Real blood, not baby dolls. Or dinosaurs.

another reason we typically don’t like arguments is that is feels like a threat.

We want to keep our kids safe, and we know that arguments and violence is the opposite of being safe.

As parents, it’s at that point we usually decide to insert ourselves into the argument/escalation/aggression that is going on in order to stop it, so that we can keep all the tiny humans in one piece.

A third reason to hate arguments between your kids can develop when we don’t know what do when they start. This is basically a combination of negative associations, and the list can pile up like this: My kids are yelling, and it’s over something dumb, and they could hurt each other, and I hate dealing with this because it never stops for long.

That is the tricky part of not only arguments but parenting at large: when and how do we as the parents/adults get involved, and how should we respond to the things that our kids are doing, especially when there might be risk involved?

I’m going to spend the rest of this post giving you some simple guidelines for how you can respond to arguments, escalations and aggression between your kids.

but first…a personal question:

What is your tolerance for loudness? How expressive are you in your own disagreements and disappointments? What were things like for you growing up?

In my family, things were more on the subdued side of things. There were hurt feelings and disagreements, of course, but conflicts were infrequent. There really wasn’t much expression of negative emotions at all. Even between my brother and I, who are fairly close in age and shared a bedroom until I went to college - we didn’t fight.

My wife’s family was different. They were on the expressive side of things, and had a much higher tolerance for argument and fights. Even now, when we spend time with her family, things are a bit louder and more contentious. Not aggressive or mean, just more.

(On a side note, this may give you a fun insight into our first year of marriage. One spouse who is used to expressing their emotions, both positive and negative, and the other who keeps things inside. It was fun times, let me tell ya!)

Neither of those two extremes are bad, it’s can just be important to reflect on how your family of origin operated and where it fell on the spectrum of how things were communicated and expressed.

HOW YOU GREW UP MAY INFORM WHAT YOU CONSIDER TO BE A NORMAL AND ACCEPTABLE AMOUNT OF CONFLICT OR EMOTIONAL EXPRESSIVENESS, WHICH WILL THEN HELP YOU FIGURE OUT WHAT IS AN ACCEPTABLE LEVEL OF AGGRESSION BETWEEN YOUR KIDS.

For example, do you care if one kid yells “give that back!” or “stop it!” from the other room? Depending on how you grew up, you might either be very concerned and thus more likely to intervene, or not concerned at all and will keep on drinking wine like a normal Wednesday afternoon.

Keep your own experiences in mind and let me know if you think I’m wrong!

The single biggest guideline that I recommended for dealing with aggression and arguments with kids is this:

hitting is not ok.

Hitting, biting, pushing - any kind of physical aggression between kids that is the result of some kind of argument and escalation is a fantastically wonderfully obvious point for you to intervene when you are aware of your kids arguing. This single point can be used to also address other frustrating situations related to kids. Here’s how:

BY NOT HAVING A BUNCH OF OTHER RULES, YOU ARE GOING TO TRUST AND ALLOW THEM THE SPACE TO NAVIGATE THEIR OWN RELATIONSHIPS AND EMOTIONS UP UNTIL THE POINT WHEN THINGS GET VIOLENT.

Having the rule that hitting is not ok means that you are concerned about the physical safety of your kids first and foremost. By not having a bunch of other rules, you are going to trust and allow them the space to navigate their own relationships and emotions up until the point when things get violent.

First, having that kind of an obvious line that your kids might cross takes a lot of the guess work out of when you should intervene. This is really nice for parents. Instead of going through the mental calculations of figuring out how bad/big the fight it, and how important it is for you to intervene, and how much effort it would take for you to get to where they are (“is this a level 5 or level 6? If it’s a level 7, I’d go check it out, but right now I’m sitting down, and I really like sitting down”) all you need to do is to figure out if someone got hurt because of this kind of aggression.

You will have to actually know when it gets to that level, but it’s the hitting and threat to safety that you are monitoring for, not overall volume.

Another reason why I like this approach is because I want my kids to have a chance to figure things out for themselves, especially in the context of problem solving in relationships.

Remember when I said that an escalation is really talking about two different things, and internal and external? That means that your kids are going to be learning on two levels from these experiences: one is to figure out how to get along with another person, and the other is the task of figuring out and regulating the emotions that would typically lead to the escalation.

As a parent, you can absolutely help them do all of that. This is where your empathy skills come into play, and you should feel free to offer some empathetic statements while an argument is going on.

This kind of an intervention is so much more helpful that a knee jerk attempt to shut down whatever is going on in your house that you don’t like.

allow the verbal expression of anger

See your kid’s arguments as a chance for them to build their relationship skills. Much of the time, they will figure out for themselves that if they take all the toys, no one will play with them, and that yelling all the time is not a good way to get people to play with you.

Another thing that happens when you limit your “stop all the things” reaction to just stopping the physical aggression, is that you allow and implicitly endorse the verbal expression of their anger. Obviously, not all of this is going to be awesome and fun or even safe in a broad sense. Kids can say mean things that have real consequences. If that does happen, you can choose to intervene and help them problem solve, instead of simply shutting down what they are expressing.

The last point I would make is what I would call the secret sauce of responding to safety concerns and thus the physical (and extreme verbal) aggression as your main rule; its puts the limits and the corrective action on what they are doing, instead of what they are feeling.

They get to feel whatever they want to. It’s their right, and we can’t stop it if we wanted to anyway. Our kids’ feelings are simply beyond our powers to reach and manipulate, and we will only escalate the situation in that moment and set them up for failure in the future if we try.

the lansbury:

But we can stop the hitting. And by this I mean actually getting involved, and physically moving your kids if they are starting to become unsafe. This must be done in a gentle and firm way, never in anger. One easy way to do this (and this comes straight from parent support OG Janet Lansbury), is like this:

AFTER YOU HAVE STOPPED THE INITIAL VIOLENCE/POTENTIAL HARMING ACTION, YOUR ATTENTION SHOULD BE ON THE KID THAT WAS BEING (OR POTENTIALLY BEING) HURT.

This can look like picking up the kid that was being pinched and saying “Oh gosh, that hurt! You were trying to play, and then you got pinched, and that made you so sad!” This brilliant move, (which I will from this point refer to as “The Lansbury”) does several things at once:

It takes the focus and attention off of the aggressor kid, for whom more attention is like gas to a fire,
it lets you actually address the most pressing hurt that is going on, instead of allowing that kid to not only get pinched, but then be ignored, and
when you are empathizing with the hurt one, the aggressor gets the chance to see how their actions actually affected another human. It’s a calm promoting, caregiving, and empathy enhancing experience, all in one!

That kind of a move takes a pretty level head, but has been revolutionary in our house.

Our instinct is to follow our anger toward the thing that is making us angry, which is 9/10 times the kid doing the hitting or pinching. While this is natural, it misses the teaching moment that we want these arguments to be. Not to mention, neglects the feelings of the kid being hurt.

As parents, we want to keep our houses calm and our kids safe, but in order to do that effectively and in a way that contributes to our kids emotional development, we can choose to focus on stopping violence, not noise or even arguing, and use the rest of the conflicts we see as chances to empathize and educate our kids on the feelings they have every right to experience.