Hitting

Recently there was a thread on one of the forums I participate in. There were questions on how to handle hitting of a child that was not even 1 year old yet.

This was my reply:

Infants and young children basically have no clue what the consequences are from their actions. They have no clue when they hurt you or not.
So its the parents job to let the child know when things hurt, whether they hurt the parent or another child or a pet. But as humans have much more complex brains as animals its obviously not as simple as to train a dog into certain behaviour. Even though with my dog I am sensitive and look at her cues whether she even gets the point - but that is an entirely different topic

So how can we do this with little humans with complicated brains. First of all think of how you would want to be treated in case you ended up in a culture where you had no clue what they were saying and they had totally different idea's on what's normal and what not.
Young children / infants don't fully understand every word we say, but they are on a level of understanding emotions and sounds. Therefore show them it hurts and use the right words and sounds with it. Also explain how it can be done differently and what you would like her to do. Just keep talking, showing and redirecting. Its not going to happen overnight, but it will happen.
Simply keep respecting your child as a fellow human being and not put them on a secondary place, which is unfortunately quite common in the western world.

Example: My 9 mos old has no clue when she hurts the dog by pulling the dogs hair. So I stay with her when she is within reach of the dog, often she goes there. Both the dog (10y) and I are very patient with her. The dog usually keeps laying there - when I am not around she disappears - and when she grabs a hand full of hair I gently loosen her hand and tell her that that will hurt the dog and show her that the dog loves being stroked.
Slowly but carefully her grip has become less hard on the dogs hair.

She also head butts us, pretty normal for young children. My partner sometimes has a hard time handling it because it can really really hurt, so he hands her to me, while he regroups himself, but we keep being gentle with her.I have also handed her to him at times. And then we simply explain to her that it really really hurts.

Another thing to realize with things like pulling hair is that the hair grabbing is a rudimentary left-over from our evolution (no offence meant to the creationists here). In those times our babies had to hold on to us on our furs, like with the apes. Therefore they still keep grabbing our hair, but as we don't have a lot of body hair left its usually our heads and some kids also hold on to the ears or nose, not to hurt, simply to feel safe.

So, back to the topic hitting. It is al right to not feel happy about it. The trick is to handle it gently and keep repeating and redirecting.
You may have to repeat it a LOT of times, she is still a baby you know.

Basically in my whole parenting thoughts I start with how I would like to be treated if I didn't get that and with that I realize that a lot of parenting ideas out there, are in my view mistreatment as its not very respectful to the child.

Other than that, I think, that basically you don't really have to do anything more than say OUCH or what ever, coz sooner or later they will get the point that OUCH means that you really don't like it and somewhat older children hate doing things that are not right, they really want to be part of the group / family they live in and really do not want to be odd. So just simply by not hitting your partner and letting her know you don't like it it will stop, but it could last a bit.