Help me teach my almost-one-year-old gentle touch

[yentroc]

My ds who is 11 months old is so rough.  I don't remember going through this with my dd, so this is all new to me and I'm at a loss.  

He's a biter.  He hits me and pulls my hair. Pinches his sister.  Etc, etc.  Sometimes he does these things out of frustration, sometimes he just does them for no reason that I can figure out.   I end each day feeling abused and frustrated especially lately when he's been having a hard time going to sleep and hits and headbutts me.  

He seems to be teething, so the biting may have to do with teething.  But he will crawl up to me and bite me on the leg just out of boredom or wanting attention, I think.

How do I teach him gentle touch?  I've put him down and told him things like, "Hands are not for hitting, teeth are not for biting". Etc.  I'm trying to teach him the sign for 'pain' and have been using that when he gets hurt or when he hurts us. 

Help!

[provocativa]

my kids understood soft touches way before gentle touches.  gentle was too abstract.  i would think you could teach him soft and hard via tactile association, and then start asking for soft touches.  putting him down when he hurts you is good.  my second dd was / is rough.  i had to stay proactive- no waiting for her to crawl up to me.  anticipate the headbutting and redirect.  i had to do a rather dramatic ouch and cry a few times for her to get it- but that was when she was older than your little one, who is just experimenting now. 

[1blueheron]

we are trying to show our little girl a specific nice way to touch rather than an abstract.  she is pretty ok with us but is rough on the poor dog.  she would occasionally pat daddy nicely, so we made a big deal out of that and said "pat pat" with big smiles and laughs.  Then we'd demonstrate when we touched the dog.  she kinda gets that, as a sort of game we all pat each other.  not perfect but better.  good luck.

[fyrwmn]

one of the early signs we taught the kids was 'gentle'...basically it's done by rubbing the back of one hand in a patting motion with the palm of the other hand. when ds starts getting rough, we remind him "gentle" and help him do the motion with his hands to show him as well. it also works to help him gently pat our face, the dog, etc. that way he associates the word with the action.

[lifeguard]

Ds is just a really rough little guy. I have said "gentle" to him more times than I could possibly count. At about the age your ds is at now I felt so abused & awful all the time. I was grateful that at least the majority of it was aimed at me & not other children (although we did a lot of protecting of the animals). Now he does very well most of the time & when he does do something inappropriate (like earlier today he hit me in the face out of the blue) I put him down, remind him he needs to be gentle & within seconds he is coming over to give me kisses & apologize.

I was very careful to be really consistent with him. Reminding him to be gentle over & over. Demonstrating gentle often with our hand over his to show him. Putting him down from me every. single. time. he was too rough. I won't say it happened quickly but he did learn & now he's quite nice to be around.

[akind1]

I agree with the show and tell approach. I do use "gentle touches" as a key word, but I also show him, opening his palm and stroking whatever it is - me, a dog, another child, etc. Granted, he does this for a few minutes, then gets excited, and we  have to repeat, but I know we are making progress because a friend's older child came up to me and said that Gabe was petting him and his baby brother like a puppy, which is exactly how I have been teaching him to do gentle touch. This way he knows he CAN touch and how.

As for the biting, DS comes up and bites our toes all the time. it is kind of funny, so we really haven't tried to stop that. He has only bit me nursing a couple times, and then I just put the boobies away, and said  "no biting, you need to suck" like everytime we nursed for a week.

He does pinch DH's nipples alot (which should teach DH not to go shirtless around the baby) and we are working with gentle touch with that too. It's a process, I think, for which there is not miracle overnight fix.