When our 4 year-old is nervous he will often respond by hitting his head and fake-laughing, grinning or making silly faces while looking to us for a response.
Things that often make him nervous are if he is expected to apologise or say hello/goodbye, or if we're going to meet someone for the first time. He is quite shy generally.
Things we've tried:
- When he started doing this about a year ago we initially tried gently telling him to not hurt himself, but found that was unproductive. At that stage we had no idea why he was doing it. In retrospect giving him a "no" instruction when he is already exhibiting a stress response was always going to be counterproductive.
- When we started to realise that anxiety might be the trigger we tried hugging him whenever he did it. Big mistake. That just made him keep going. So at that point we concluded he was seeking attention by doing it.
- We tried ignoring it completely. This helped. The frequency reduced but hasn't gone away. This is a rather unsatisfying outcome since he's obviously in discomfort when he does it, so it doesn't feel like it addresses the core issue.
We recently visited my uncle for the first time overseas, and as I mentioned to him that we were going to see him tomorrow, he started hitting himself. I thought I'd try something different, and told him that I'm very nervous because I haven't seen my uncle in a long time, and that I'll need lots of hugs to feel better. His face kind of lit up in surprise, he said sometimes like "no, you don't get nervous!" and then gave me a big hug. No hitting.
So I think we've slowly honed in on what this is, ie. He's anxious and he's not able to articulate it or seek comfort in a constructive way.
So while I think we can address the hitting, I don't feel we've made any progress in getting him to articulate when he feels nervous.
Recently he saw a scene in a movie that scared him, and he told us he was scared. That was a big step forward for him, and he's been very excited lately to tell us when he finds things "spooky" and whether he's "scared" or "not scared". I'd love for him to start doing this with telling us when he's nervous.
Our current plan is just to keep modelling the desired behaviour (e.g. telling him when we're feeling nervous and asking for comfort). I'm hoping to get others' thoughts on this, either from a best practices/ theory perspective or just from other parents who have dealt with similar issues.
Also, just noting that we've discussed this with a psychologist. They assessed him for ADHD and autism, concluded that there were no symptoms, and dumped us. We're in an area where finding another psychologist is not practical.
