Believe it or not, your kid’s repetitive habits—from shirt sucking to playdough sniffing—might be helping them regulate their senses.
“My 6-year-old is a squeezer,” says Amanda Ponzar of Alexandria, Virginia. “He used to squeeze the flabby underarm of every lady he encountered: Me, his grandma, his teachers.” Sometimes he’d accidentally squeeze too hard, or sometimes he’d squeeze a stranger. “I was always apologizing for him, and his father punished him,” says Ponzar. “We didn’t know why he was doing this.”