When responding to an undesirable behavior doesn't seem to be working it's time to teach a new way to express excited and happy! Things like hi-fives and fist bumps might be good alternatives. For this to work try to anticipate his way of showing you happy and excited and then prompt your alternative. Ideally you would get him to use the alternative without engaging in the hitting. To make the new way of expressing happy and excited stick try to use exaggerated physical praise along with verbal praise that is descriptive of the thing that might had triggered that feeling of happiness and excitement. With enough pairing of the physical and verbal praise in time you should be able to use physical and verbal praise independent of one another.

Haha... We must say "Be soft!" in this house every hour it seems. My son is the same as yours. What worked for us was laughing (so he knows we're not upset) while saying be soft. In the beginning we would then take his hand and, hand over hand, hit us in the same spot he just did, but softly. Then we'd say good! That's soft!

But I will say that that approach didn't stop him from ever smacking the crap out of us in excitement. He still does it but now he understands the command and after the first smack, he's softer with the rest.

We are working on the same thing with our little one. His special ed teacher has encouraged us to use words to describe what he may be feeling to help guide him to talk instead, such as "You're so excited we're watching your favorite movie." "You're so happy we're playing together." I'm not sure how much progress we've seen so far, but it does help me to stay focused on how he's feeling instead of getting angry about being hit/tapped repeatedly. I KNOW exactly how hard it is to deal with this issue.

I completely agree. Try to find an alternate, more socially acceptable behavior and practice using the new behavior with family or with their speech or OT therapist. They will eventually get used to using this new behavior. It takes a little while sometimes, but I found it to work great!

Laughter deff helps lol it's those unexpected smacks that hurt so I've started pretending to cry when he does it so he stops and hugs now. But yeah he still will go to town on you lol