Lead
One afternoon, a daycare calls: your child bit another child. The following week, they hit someone. At home, they took a toy from a younger sibling and, when the sibling resisted, kicked them.
In that moment, certain questions probably cross your mind. Is this abnormal? Is our parenting to blame? Are we raising a violent child?
The short answer, based on decades of developmental research, is that biting, hitting, and kicking around age two are well within the typical range. Declining from that peak is the norm. The real question is not "Is my child aggressive?" but "How is this behavior changing over time?" This article traces what longitudinal data show about the trajectory of physical aggression and identifies the threshold that warrants closer attention.