The weight range of the rats for the length of snake you are describing definitely sounds like its being underfed slightly. Increase prey size and/or frequency and you may notice her sitting down more and becoming a little less food aggressive. However, if she was from a wild collected batch of pures, or if she was bred from wild collected adults, she may also just have that little bit of extra freakout tendencies.
As noted above; SD remain smaller and thus have a larger sense of fear from the get go. Hook training is an important tool, and used properly can prevent this food aggression from leaving the cage. If your son has a problem with using hooks, retics are not the snake for him. They need to be conditioned to when they are going to receive food without question. If you use the hook system, conditioning them becomes second nature for them, and when they see the hook its a lightbulb that clicks and says no food. If they only see a hand and glass door opening every time they are fed and everytime they are handled, there's too many possibilities - one of which being FOOD. This drives that aggression a little bit more so. It's not too late to start hook training, but its going to be more difficult at this point.
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