How can I stop these strange habits my son has?

Question

My 5 year old son is an absolutely normal kid, no diagnosed disorders, he's not autistic, very healthy. There's two habits that he has that I want to try and kick.

1) He picks his lips. While this can also be contributed to me, as I sometimes pick my lips when I'm bored or nervous. He however picks them until they're bloody. This happens everyday and his lips are always horribly scabby and gross.

2) He sniffs ALL the time. Like you know you sniff when you have a cold or something. He is perfectly healthy but sniffs probably 1/minute with the exception of him sleeping. It really gets annoying. He has no dianosed allergies, he's not sick and when I do ask him to blow his nose, usually nothing comes out.

I'm not looking to medicate him. How do I stop these annoying habits?

Answer 1

I think these are called nervous ticks.

My daughter is 4 she chews on her hair. It makes me crazy because her hair gets all dirty like dread locks. All I can do is try to remind her to stop or put her hair in a pony tail. But chewing on hair doesn't make her bleed. I might see a doctor if she was hurting herself. Thats your call though.

You might try having him wear some batting gloves so he can't use his finger nails. They look kind of cool and It might just be the reminder he needs. He probably doesn't realize he's doing it.

You could put something that tastes nasty on the fingers. When I was a kid, my Mom put hot sauce on my sister's fingernails to keep her from biting them. It worked eventually. I don't know if that would work for picking though.

Check his nose for stray nose hair. It sounds gross but I'm a grown man and I realized I was sniffing a lot. I've done that most of my life. It doesn't happen when I trim those nose hairs. LOL

Good luck.

Answer 2

My daughter also picks at her lips, and the only thing i can suggest is to put lip balm on them ALL the time, so that there is nothing dry for him to pick.

The sniffing is probably habit, and I think that if you continually ask him not to sniff, or to blow his nose, or something like that- maybe even for every couple of times give him a spoonfull of 'medicine' something he doesn't like drinking very much on a medicine spoon- and eventually he should stop.

Hoped that helped!

Answer 3

Geeze leave the poor kid alone already!  The reason he sniffs all the time could be because it is too dry in your home and the dryness makes his nose stuffy.  

YOU created the first habit in him...so you have no right to gripe about it

Answer 4

My son, like me, has a full bottom lip that gets chapped very easily.  He also picks at the skin because it flakes all the time.  How I manage it is, I put a gooey lip gloss on him at night after he falls asleep, and then the next day his lips have healed and are soft enough that they aren't a problem.  I put it on after he falls asleep because he hates the feeling of it on his lips - even though it really works.  

I would say it is a nervous habit just like the sniffing.  I don't know what to do about nervous habits, as I am a victim too : )

except I heard somewhere recently that if you want to break one habit, you need to replace it with something else.  How to stop sniffing needlessly?  Ask your doctor because there is something possibly that is irritating his nose enough that sniffing is giving him some temporary relief from.