Part 2: How to interpret biting behaviour, and what to do about it

Part 2: How to interpret biting behaviour, and what to do about it

Feeling protected and secure is only part of what the Safety Cup® holds. It also drives physiological growth. It's the Cup that pushes us to eat, to move, and in the early years, to gather the sensory input the developing brain needs to wire itself up. A child is born with an innate urge to gather sensory data about the world they've arrived in. When a child's body isn't getting that input they actively seek it out.  

Here's why that matters more than it might sound. A baby is born with sensory surfaces already in place, the eyes, the ears, the skin, the proprioceptors buried in every muscle and joint. But the wiring that turns raw sensation into useful information is not finished at birth. It develops through experience. Myelination, the process that speeds and sharpens the brain's pathways, moves rapidly through the sensory areas in the early years as the brain learns about the particular world it has been born into. The brain wires around the sensory world it finds, using the sensory surfaces it arrived with. No sensory experience, no wiring. 

We already have a striking example of this. Sensory input from the natural world, in this case light, is part of what grows a healthy sensory surface. The eye needs adequate natural daylight to grow to the right shape and size. When children spend too much time indoors and not enough outside in natural light, the eye can grow in a way that leaves them short-sighted. We're seeing exactly this in rising rates of myopia across the Western world and parts of Asia (French et al., 2013). If a sensory surface as visible and well-studied as the eye can be shaped this profoundly by too little natural input, it's worth pausing to imagine what happens to proprioception, whose sensory surface isn't one small organ but is spread through every joint, bone, and muscle in the body. 

This is where interoception comes in, too. Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion (Feldman Barrett, 2017) tells us the brain is constantly reading signals from inside the body (interoception) and from our sensory surfaces, then comparing them against past experience to predict what we need and decide how to respond. A well-wired sensory system helps a child do this accurately, gathering a wealth of information from their body and their world and making sense of it. 

And there's more at stake here than a body getting what it needs. Feldman Barrett's work tells us the brain also uses this sensory information to construct our emotions (Feldman Barrett, 2017). So the quality of a child's sensory experience in the early years shapes far more than their physical development. It shapes the raw material their brain draws on to build what they feel. There are so many reasons we can't afford to get this wrong. 

When a child's sensory system is under stimulated, the internal signal isn't subtle. It's loud, and it demands a response. One of the fastest ways to answer that call, to get sensory input when the body is starved of it, is through the jaws, teeth, and tongue. You've felt it yourself. Reaching for something crunchy to eat when you're restless, chewing ice, chewing the end of a pen. When a child's sensory system is under-fed, has no autonomous access to food, and spends far more hours indoors than out, biting becomes a highly efficient way to get what the body is asking for. 

How to spot it 

A sensory bite doesn't look like the others. It's long. It's hard. It can draw blood. The child holding on doesn't let go quickly, and sometimes you may have even seen their jaw tremor as the deep-pressure feedback lands. There's no anger in it and no performance either. It's regulation, happening in real time, through the mouth. 

In my experience, the child on the receiving end tends to be the squishiest, slowest child in the group. This looks like the child is targeting weakness, but from my observations, it seems like a slow, soft child is the easiest source of long, sustained pressure. 

One child, or an epidemic 

Sometimes a sensory bite comes from a single child whose sensory system is developing differently. In that case, the biting is information about the child’s development. 

But sometimes it isn't one child. I've walked into rooms with five children out of twelve all biting like this. When that happens, stop looking at the individual child for the answer. The behaviour is telling you about the environment, not the child. That's what I'd call a biting epidemic, and it's almost always caused by the setting.  

What to actually do about it 

Run a two-week trial. Design a program of intense, natural sensory stimulation, real climbing, heavy work, vestibular play, loads of planning for proprioception, and generous outdoor time, then track biting incidents daily. If the numbers drop, you have your answer, and you have your permanent program. 

Audit the whole sensory diet, not just the mouth. A child's sensory system takes in far more than taste and touch. Look at the full picture. 

• Proprioception: heavy work like pushing wheelbarrows, carrying, lifting logs and rocks, climbing, and hanging from their whole body weight. Watch the children in an environment that offers none of this and you'll see them improvise, hanging off the one wooden arch in the room until the top rungs snap, because there's nowhere designed for it. And the challenge has to keep growing. Once a child has mastered a height or a movement, the environment needs to offer the next level of complexity, the next calculated risk, or the input stops meeting the need. 
• Vestibular: swinging, spinning, hanging upside down, rolling, balance challenges. 
• Time outdoors: more outdoors than indoors, and not as an occasional treat, and never to "burn off energy." Outdoor time is not about getting rid of energy children don't need (that’s not a thing). Children’s brains and bodies need their energy to learn and grow. And they need the outdoor world for bone growth, muscle growth, proprioception, vestibular development, and the intricate brain maturation that happens as all these sensory systems wire in and learn to work together. 
• Access: Discuss with your team - can children choose these experiences at any time they’re urged to, or only during scheduled adult directed outdoor blocks? 

Reach for rhythm and music, not a screen. Patterned, repetitive experiences like song and rhythm can help calm a dysregulated nervous system and support a felt sense of safety and predictability, particularly for children whose sensory systems are already working overtime. This does not mean three rooms each blasting a different YouTube playlist off an iPad. That's just noise, and someone always ends up arguing over the screen. It means educators learning to use their own voices and a few simple instruments, so the tool is ready at a moment's notice, whenever a child needs help to regulate. 

Offer chewellery as a replacement. Once the program is right and a child is still seeking oral input, removing or punishing the biting won't address what's driving it. A chewellery resource, offered the moment you catch a bite, or catch the wind-up to one, gives the sensory system somewhere else to put that need. Encourage the chewing. This works best when educators are quick to notice and quick to offer. 

Bring in an OT. If chewellery or another sensory support, like a weighted blanket, is clearly helping, that's valuable information, and it's time for an occupational therapist to assess and guide the ongoing use of these supports properly. 

A bigger point about this precious window of brain development 

There's a reason this is urgent rather than merely nice to get right. The research on how environments shape brain development suggests the brain uses the predictability of its surroundings as a cue for how long to stay highly plastic (Tooley et al., 2021). Environments full of rare, diverse, novel experiences seem to signal that the world is still changing and that staying adaptable is worth it. Flat, uniform, highly predictable days may send the opposite signal. 

So here's a question worth sitting with as a team. If that's how the developing brain reads its environment, what might it be learning from long stretches indoors, day in and day out, with the same four walls, the same resources, the same sensations, and no increasing physical challenge? 

This matters for emotional development in particular, because early childhood is a sensitive period for building the "social brain," the networks underneath skills like empathy, perspective-taking, and self-regulation (Schneider et al., 2022). Those competencies need a prolonged stretch of plasticity to develop well. 

But even before that wonderful social and emotional work happens, the sensory and motor systems need to develop. Brain development seems to work something like a domino effect, building up from fundamental sensory and motor systems toward complex social and emotional processing (Dooley & van der Heijden, 2024). Complex physical movement, climbing, balancing, running, doesn't sit in a separate box from emotional development. It matures alongside it and helps support it. Giving children the freedom to explore physically challenging environments autonomously is one of the ways we help foster self-regulation, emotional development, and resilience. 

So, a sensory-motivated bite, especially one showing up across several children at once, is worth taking seriously as far more than a behaviour to be managed. It's a signal that a developing brain and body are being held back from the input they're built to seek. 

Reflection 

Before you write another incident report for a sensory-motivated bite, ask your team: 

• How much of our day is spent indoors versus outdoors? And honestly, how much more autonomous access to the outdoors could we offer? 
• Where in our environment can a child get proprioceptive or vestibular input right now, without waiting for a scheduled activity or adult-directed outdoor time? Ask this at several random moments across the day and write down your answer. If you've ever spotted that wooden arch indoors with the top dowel rungs broken, you already know where the children are getting their proprioceptive input, and it isn't outside. 
• If one child is biting like this, is anyone else showing subtler signs of the same under stimulation? 

Biting is one of the clearest, fastest pieces of information a child can hand you about what their Cups need. And a sensory-motivated bite, particularly when it's happening across more than one child, is a blaring alarm that the developing brain and body are being held back. The fix is often astonishingly simple. 

Open the doors. 

References

Dooley, J. C., & van der Heijden, M. E. (2024). More Than a Small Brain: The Importance of Studying Neural Function during Development. The Journal of neuroscience, 44(48), e1367242024. https://doi.org/10.1523/JNEUROSCI.1367-24.2024

Feldman Barrett, L. (2017). How emotions are made : the secret life of the brain. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt,.

French, A. N., Morgan, I. G., Mitchell, P., & Rose, K. A. (2013). Risk Factors for Incident Myopia in Australian Schoolchildren: The Sydney Adolescent Vascular and Eye Study. Ophthalmology, 120(10), 2100-2108. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ophtha.2013.02.035

Phoenix, S., & Phoenix, C. (2019). The Phoenix Cups: A Cup filling story. Phoenix Support Publishing.

Schneider, N., Greenstreet, E., & Deoni, S. C. L. (2022). Connecting inside out: Development of the social brain in infants and toddlers with a focus on myelination as a marker of brain maturation. Child development, 93(2), 359-371. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.13649

Tooley, U. A., Bassett, D. S., & Mackey, A. P. (2021). Environmental influences on the pace of brain development. Nature reviews. Neuroscience, 22(6), 372-384. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41583-021-00457-5

AUTHOR: Sandi Phoenix BPsychSc, GradCertProfSt, GradCertHM&Neuro, CertIVTAEManaging Director of Phoenix Support for Educators Pty Ltd