"When a young child pulls their hair, picks their skin, or bites their nails to the point of injury, it's natural for the adults in their lives to want to focus on stopping the behavior. Parents want to prevent their child from experiencing harm, and clinicians want to help the child gain control and relieve their parents of worry. But with body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs), especially in young children, control is rarely the place to start."
"BFRBs are not just habits to be eliminated; they are part of how a child is learning to respond to internal experiences. That means our work, as treatment providers, needs to extend the focus beyond the behavior itself. It has to include how the child relates to their thoughts, feelings, sensations, and,critically, the story they are beginning to tell about themselves."
Young children's body-focused repetitive behaviors (BFRBs) — hair pulling, skin picking, nail biting — function as ways to respond to internal sensations, thoughts, and emotions rather than simply habits to stop. Adults often prioritize control and behavior suppression, but repeated reminders, monitoring, or critical responses can reinforce shame and self-definitions like 'I can't help myself' or 'my body is a problem.' Effective treatment shifts focus to how children relate to their internal experiences, separates identity from behavior, and cultivates awareness, compassion, communication, and regulation to reduce shame and increase behavioral flexibility and adaptive coping.
Read at Psychology Today
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