Please Help, Toddler suddenly hitting

DS is going to be 3 in May. Usually plays nice and so passive. In daycare the teacher says if a child takes something from him he just moves on to something else.
Has always been passive and avoids conflicts.
He's also delayed and immature so I feel like he's just becoming a toddler, but late. If you understand. He goes to EI for Speech and OT. He's starting to catch up for his age with comprehension, but delayed in expressive and receptive language.
Now when he's frustrated he'll hit himself or bang his head.
I called the teacher today to see how he was doing and she said he's been off the last few days. More moody and hitting kids. Not hard at all (I know DS b/c he taps) and she said he's just tapping the other kids, but of course she has to talk to him about it. He doesn't understand or like to get in trouble so she said he goes and bangs his head.
He's been doing this at home, but I guess just started at school
She said he will do nice when asked.
I just don't know how to teach him about not hitting.
He'll do it to his baby brother, but like I said.. it's a tap so I distract him or remove the baby from the situation.
I just don't know how to work with him on not hurting others.
How does one go from extremely passive to starting to hit and get moody?
Thanks!

Re: Please Help, Toddler suddenly hitting

Ah yes. My son was pretty independent, not passive actually, but he never hit other kids until he was in daycare awhile. He did it at the first daycare, then we switched and he was fine at the second one for awhile. Then he started doing it again. It made no sense to me or his teachers--while hitting is always aggressive, he usually did it when he was happy. When I started to see him do this at the playground and such, he seemed excited and the hitting seemed an extension of this.

We wound up having a Functional Behavior Assessment done by his SEIT. My husband and I did time outs with him at home (he was hitting us too, and no amount of make nice, redirecting, etc. worked). This worked, but the hitting actually got worse at school and his daycare wouldn't do time outs. So we had the FBA. She found the hitting was at times just as I described above, and generally sensory related in some form. He would also hit kids who got too close to him or if there was just too much overstimulation. She talked to his teachers about doing a modified time out (since this is the only thing that worked at home), where he was basically removed from the scene for a few minutes and then asked to tell the other child he was sorry. She also made stories for him that incorporated some lesson about not hitting, and talked to him about what we do and don't do with our hands. He got praised when he would do positive things with his hands, like wave to a friend, or pass another child a toy, etc. He also got stickers for good days, and prizes now and then when he'd have a good run of it. His integrated PreK follows many of the same principles. Speech helped a lot too--his speech therapist worked on communicating his needs better. He wasn't telling anyone, you are too close or telling his teachers he needed to be quiet if things got too frenzied, and he had good speaking ability at this point. But the pragmatic speech was lacking.

It took awhile, but it did work. The time outs were not exactly like the traditional time outs, but we found a format that worked. The one thing I can say is you really have to do them immediately after the hit--initially we gave him a warning, but that got us nowhere. He seemed to think it was cute. Hope this helps!

And big . This was hard--I started dreading picking up DS from daycare. I think you said your son may have sensory processing issues, so it's possible the hitting is similar.

Message edited 2/17/2012 7:34:00 PM.