Biting

Post Reply New Topic

My son is 5 (turning 6 in a month). He is diagnosed as having Sensory Processing Disorder, Anxiety NOS, and 'come back next year we'll diagnose ASD, too bad you didn't get here while the DSM IV was in effect, he definitely meets the old Asperger's criteria'.

The immediate problem is that for the last ten days or so, he has been biting himself and chewing his nails (finger and toe nails). It doesn't seem to be from frustration. He isn't trying to hurt himself. He hasn't broken the skin yet, but does leave teeth marks and sometimes hickies. It's kind of like three different biting related behaviors. 1) Chewing on nails. 2) Sort of distracted clamping his teeth on his arms or hands while doing something else. 3) Repetitively biting his legs and then looking at the marks and giggling.


More Info:

He hasn't been in any therapies, because until we finally got the Anxiety diagnosis he fell through every crack. Now, he should be starting OT to address the Sensory issues as soon as the place can get him worked in to the schedule. He's not in school. I put him on a Kindergarten Waiver which allows for the optional placement next fall in either Kindergarten or First grade. We did preschool last year and that was a hugely miserable experience for him.

By anxiety I mean that until the last few weeks he was unable to even go into our backyard to play without panic or meltdown. Only recently has he been able to sit down and work on a workbook, see that his writing is not perfect (and he has a mild problem with fine motor skills, so it isn't), and not spend the rest of the day at meltdown or near meltdown stage. Leaving the house to go places is like torturing him. Sensory wise the biggest problem is extreme sensitivity to sound, especially singing. Touch is another bad one for him and it definitely plays off the anxiety in a feedback loop.

He stims quite a lot--spinning, flapping, toe walking, flashing lights in front of his face, etc. Sometimes he bites himself or bangs his head out of frustration. He has a very mature vocabulary, and a storehouse of practically every line from every game or movie he's ever seen to quote from. (I got, "Curse you, mom!! !! modified from Phineas and Ferb's 'Curse you, Perry the Platypus!! !!' earlier tonight when he wasn't happy about something.) His pronunciation is immature (just barely above the range to get Speech). Actual two-way communication is often times very difficult. He rarely directly answers questions, preferring to ignore, change subject back to his monologue, or use a quote that just doesn't quite make sense. (This is one of the only places I feel like I can say that and have people understand what I mean when I say my hyper-verbal, high vocabulary child is often not really communicating.)

He has a talent for numbers. Last week he announced that he could now count by 2's, 5's, 10's (went over 100 in each), and 3's (got bogged at 48), and then later counted to 520. I didn't do anything to teach him these things. He put it together from scraps of conversations and playing verbally with numbers. He knows all the addition problems up to 10 without thinking, and go up to 20 pretty reliably (a mistake is still a meltdown. We had one of those today when he mis-added 7+7, saying it was 15.)

Regarding the biting, that sounds like a variation on the chewing stim. Maybe find him something else to chew on? They can be picky. You may have to try different ones or a wet washcloth or something to see what he likes. My son preferred shirt collars at that age. I did find a chewy he would use and he gradually started reducing chewing on shirts. Stress exacerbated it.

(He does still chew his fingernails.)

For #2, a kid we used to see in the waiting room had some kind of black plastic or leather cuff on his wrist to chew on. I found something similar on this page:

https://www.therapyshoppe.com/category/P2324-oh-plah-chewy-bracelets-necklaces-tubes-chewable-jewelry

DS used to chew his shirt collars terribly at that age. Unfortunately (fortunately?) we didn't know it had anything to do with ASD and just kept nagging at him to stop until he outgrew or tired of it. He still chews his Legos and small toys sometimes, in secret, and the other day I noticed he had a hickey/bite mark. He couldn't remember if he did it to himself or his little sister did it.

Oh, yeah. I know exactly what you mean.

At that age most of my son's conversation was echolalia script-driven. If we were lucky he pulled something from his database that answered the question correctly. Sometimes he would just have something with a keyword and it was the opposite.

Is your son hyperlexic, too?

My daughter does the biting thing. Almost exactly minus #3 with the giggling. She bits her fingernails, toenails, and her arm. Also her clothes on the collar, sleeve, and knee. The only thing I've founf that helps is this:
https://www.etsy.com/shop/ChewieRope?re ... eader-name

This is the best I've found. I tried the silicone necklaces and she... flat out ate it. Wooden, chewed to dangerous little bits. Jersey knit? Fell apart in one day. But this necklace? Has lasted a few months. She still bites the other places if she forgets. But if she remembers she is wearing it, she does prefer the necklace.

The biting is 100% an oral stim. It FEELS GOOD. Ah, how well I remember. I left teeth marks on my arms and fingers (still chew my lip and the side of my right index finger), sucked my thumb, and left teeth marks all over the back of one of Grandma's kitchen chairs (the vinyl ones from the 50s that went with a chrome-and-formica table-- I still get a warm fuzzy feeling from the memory of how it felt between my teeth-- God bless Grandma, she gave the set away years ago when her sister-in-law replaced the wooden bench set that G. had been coveting for a decade and a half, but kept the chair I'd chewed as a souvenir of raising BeeBee-- poor thing, it must be painful in the museum of her heart). It felt SOOOOO good. Like sitting in a patch of sunshine.

I would probably tolerate the nail-biting. It's a "bad habit," but a common one. I know a lot of nail biters and pencil chewers who have acceptable marriages and good-paying jobs (Hubby is one of them). The rest of it will flip people out, and probably needs to be redirected.

The chewies work pretty good. One of those stuffed-animal teethers with the rubber hands and feet solved the rage-biting problem we had with DD5 when she was between 3 and 4. We named it "Nippy Puppy." Last weekend, she made the decision to give it to her baby sister (on the condition that she can still hug it sometimes-- she got pretty close to Nippy Puppy).

Gum and gummy candies and soft dried fruits like prunes and apricots work pretty good too, and I think there are also chewy pencil toppers.

Speaking of Grandma, I'm late to call her. I'd better stop perseverating on message boards and pick up the phone, talk to the old girl, and do my dishes. She's 89. WrongPlanet will most likely be here after Grandma has departed Planet Earth.

Yup-- Google "chewable jewelry" or "chewable pencil toppers" or "chewable toys." They even come in cool colors and fun shapes, and they're almost cheap enough to buy one for each member of the kindergarten class (it went over great when we gave away $3 pencil fidgets as gifts to all the fidgety kids in DS's first grade class-- it cost $30, but being on the teacher's "cool parents" list was PRICELESS-- hey, look, it's a MasterCard commercial!!).

Remember those triangular plastic pencil grips from the 80s?? I think they're still around too-- and I believe the PTA at my kids' school sells them for something like $1.00 a piece, or maybe AR Reading points. Which means they're probably, like, 30 cents a piece for a box of 500 through Oriental Trading Company or something.

If you don't have a philosophical or safety objection to Oriental Trading (I do-- I'm one of those people for whom having to shop at WalMart instead of the thrift store or buy anything other than food new just rankles; I'm so friggin' crunchy that I grit my teeth at cauliflower from California).

Yeah, people with Asperger's tend to be moralistic to a really irritating fault...

Very common stim or self-calming mechanism. You can look for other things he is able to chew instead but, actually, as long as he isn't actually hurting himself (breaking skin), I wouldn't get too upset by it. The afterschool care director at my son's elementary school used to say that the nice thing about using hand chewing for self-calming is that it is always there, the child never has to agitatedly search for their chew object of choice. My son was more into chewing clothing, but another boy in the program with my son was a severe hand chewer (he has since grown out of it).

Straws are a common and easy chew item, btw. You could also consider supplying your son with a whole bunch. Nice things about straws is that you know they are made to go into a mouth; many other chewable objects really are not, and you have no way of knowing how many potentially harmful chemicals your child might be ingesting (at least with his hand you know its organic).

No, he doesn't read yet. He knows the letters and the sounds that go with most of them, so he isn't behind for a preschooler. He really focuses on numbers. He likes to spend considerable time asking us what is 2+2, 3+3, 4+4 (he likes the doubles more than anything else), then he'll branch off to other math facts. He can easily spend an hour doing that, and then he just announces that he knows how to count by multiples without ever having directly asked about them. (He said, "That's just adding 5 (2, 3, 10) every time." I can remember having that same epiphany for multiplication...in 3rd grade.)

Super cool!