At first, it was only occasional, and totally excusable, since he wasn't even 2 yet. A kid was playing with a ball he wanted, and he took a chomp. The first day it happened, I went out to the playground, where he was happily sliding. He'd forgotten about the incident. He was more interested in playing peek-a-boo with me.
When I got home, Regina and I tried gentle discipline.
"Elijah," I said in my most stentorian voice. "Look at me."
He did, his eyes big, sheepish and serious.
"Biting is very, very bad."
"It makes other kids sad," Regina said. "And they cry."
"It's wrong, and you can't do it anymore," I said. "Now, what did you do at school today that was wrong?"
"All fall down!" Elijah said.
"No, Elijah," I said. "I'm not talking about Ring Around the Rosie. What did you do that was bad?"
"Um..." he said. "BI! BI BA!"
"That's right. Biting is bad. Are you going to bite someone again?"
"Nuuuuuuuu."
Things got worse when he went to the "big kids class" for older toddlers. When we'd signed Elijah up, there were 13 kids in each class, with two teachers and a whole gaggle of assistants. By the time he moved up, it was 17 kids, there were fewer assistants, and we were paying $50 more a month. He unleashed himself. For months, he bit three days out of five.
In particular, Elijah seemed to enjoy biting a sad-eyed little girl named Sophie, with whom he was obviously in love. He wouldn't stop talking about her at home. "Daddy, what's Sophie doing?" he'd ask. Or he'd say, "I bite Sophie!" and start cackling. I found myself having to say, both because it was true and because it was funny, "Elijah, you can only bite girls if they ask you to."
But it started growing less funny. Friends suggested therapy, but our crappy health insurance, which costs us $500 a month, doesn't cover therapy. At school, they told him to "use his words," but using his words wasn't really the problem, since he knows how to use his words just fine. That said, he's not capable of voicing a thought much more complex than "I want ice on my boo-boo," or "Maybe there's a rabbit in my closet that's scaring me." Not much for a shrink to work with there.
They were putting him in timeout at school, but he didn't seem to mind that, either, because it was one of the rare times he got individual attention. We devised an incentive program with his teachers. If you don't bite, we told him, you'll get ice cream. But after a couple of days of ice cream, he was sated, and he'd bite again. They told us to start sending him to school with a family picture in his pocket. If he bit they'd take the picture away. This worked for about three days. That's when we got called in for the conference.
- - - - - - - - - - - -
The Yale study recommends that states prohibit pre-K expulsion, develop clear policies for dealing with children with behavioral problems, and require training for all preschool teachers to deal with these problems. Those are fine recommendations, and I really hope privately funded schools also take heed, though I suspect the prospects are slim. I certainly know that a "behavioral aide" would have been nice for us these last few months. Our son may be a mildly psychotic hothead, but he's also smart and cute and funny. The school certainly tried, and so did we, but we all ended up treating him as just another naughty kid. Instead of actual help, we had a series of quarter measures inevitably leading to a conference that detailed a disciplinary disaster.
Elijah's teacher gave us a stack of injury reports an inch thick. They were all for things Elijah had done to other kids.
"These are just this month's," she said. "And they're just the ones where he drew blood. It also doesn't include the dozens of times we've caught him just before he attacked another kid. We have to pull him off kids three or four times a day." She sighed.
"I have seven new kids coming into my class next month," she continued. "And they're little."
Regina and I looked at each other. Here came the hammer.
"I just think it'll be better for everyone," teacher said, "and that Elijah might be happier, if he went somewhere else."
There's no cataloging the feeling of helplessness that washed over Regina and me then. Our child was being expelled. From preschool. What had we done wrong? I felt terribly guilty. Though I was never a biter, my own childhood was full of intermittent emotional outbursts, fights, visits to behavioral specialists when the schools made them available, and lots of muddled weeping. This continued well into adulthood, until about a year and a half ago when I started taking a pill that shall not be named here but that helped me a lot. Elijah's struggles made me especially sad because I knew that not much could be done to soothe his turbulent little mind. The fact that he has my full sympathy and understanding will provide little solace whenever that chemical stew inside his cranium goes out of balance. Why couldn't he have inherited his mother's demeanor? She's a little bossy and self-righteous, but at least she's sane.
"I guess we knew there was a problem," Regina said. "But..."
The teacher said she felt "sick" about this. She'd had to talk to her boss, the school's director. The boss came to class and said, "Him? How could he be trouble? He looks like a little Botticelli... "
Elijah's teachers were kind and more than competent, but terribly overworked. As for the director, she could have seen our son sometime between the day she'd first taken our money and the day she'd expelled him. Maybe, I thought, if she didn't leave 17 kids in the charge of two teachers, we might have had less of a problem. Now she was telling me my kid looks like a Botticelli cherub?
"He's smart as a whip," teacher said. "I can see it in his eyes when I talk to him. He understands everything. He just has problems with impulse control. Maybe you should get him some clay," she said. "Something he can pound his aggression into. Or find him a nanny who can give him individual attention."
I wanted to say: He already has clay, superstar. And do we look like we can afford a nanny? Instead, I said...
"Can we just have until June 1?"
On the drive home, Regina and I could barely keep from weeping. Our respective families were 1,000 miles away in either direction. We were terrified at the prospect of a summer without help. The irony was that we don't have the $1,500 it would have cost to warehouse Elijah through September, so we might have had to pull him out anyway. But now we've been forced into the challenge of caring for a smart, stubborn, high-strung 2-year-old. We love him very much, but that's not the kind of work either of us wants, at least not full time.
"I was a good boy, mama and daddy!" Elijah said.
"Yes, son," I said.
"I no put rocks up my nose today!"
"Good boy," I said.
"No!" he said. "I not a good boy! I hurt my friends!"
"Oh," Regina said.
"I'm a good boy!" he shrieked. "I'm a good boy! I'm a good boy!"
One day last week, Regina dropped Elijah off at school. Teacher was standing there with a little girl. They looked very serious.
"This is Sophie," teacher said.
She lifted the girl's shirt. There was an enormous bite mark on Sophie's back that was just beginning to scab over. Sophie's dad had started calling the school. From here on, Elijah wouldn't be allowed anywhere near any of the other kids. That would be his last day.
At home, Regina had this to say, through tears.
"I feel like a bad mother!" she said. "I don't want to spend all summer with him! He's difficult! He's a difficult child! He wants too much from me. And you're going to go crazy if he's around all the time. Our marriage always suffers when he's home!"
"So our marriage has to suffer," I said.
"This is a fiasco," she said.
Later that afternoon, a few of Regina's paintings were going on display at a local gallery. My job was to keep Elijah from tearing the room apart. I was reasonably successful. When we got home, I had some things to empty out of the car. Regina took Elijah inside. He was begging her to let him open the refrigerator. I came inside to hear this:
"AHHHHH! He bit me!"
I threw down the sippy cups, shouted something like "I've had it with your goddamn biting!" scooped Elijah up by the armpits, and plopped him down into the "penalty chair," our version of Supernanny's "naughty mat." I held him there until he stopped shrieking, and then he gave me a kiss and apologized to his mommy.
All was peaceful again in the house, temporarily. But Elijah still had the same problems and we were still broke. In our minds and in our hearts, Regina and I silently wished the summer away.
This story has been changed since it was originally published.
About the writer
Neal Pollack's memoir, "Daddy Was a Sinner," will be published in fall 2006.
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