Parenting

Do you know what is prompting the "attacks"? Is grandma doing something that scares her or that she thinks is aggressive? If grandma is going in for a kiss and kiddo doesn't feel comfortable or safe with that she might lash out. Scratching her is unacceptable but I wonder if she thinks it's defensive. You probably can tell the difference between clumsiness and aggression at that age and if it's purposeful then I would talk to grandma about watching for nonverbal cues of nonconsent.

As far as the scratching, every kid is different, but what worked for our kid was showing that his actions hurt and upset us. At that age, rather than disciplining or doing a time out when he hit me, I tried to show the effect his behavior had on me in his own language. When he hit me, I would do my best impression of what he would do when he was hurt. So basically, I pretended to cry, and if that didn't take I would shy away and avoid his hands. It shocked him to realize he could make the big person sad and upset and he didn't want me to be sad, which led to genuine apologies. I would stop when he did something conciliatory, like say "sorry" in sign language, offer me an object or try to hug or pat me. As he gets older I adapt to his level of sophistication, so now I do things differently, but when he was one to two it seemed to help him conceptualize that we were also humans with feelings.