Talk:Time-out (parenting)

The actual idea behind time-out is to get the parent to cool-off. They are the real problem in a confrontation. It's rare that children need to "cool off".

The theory behind adult time-outs is that you deprive the child of your attention. Of course, in our electronic gadget society where children hardly ever see their parents anyways, that accomplishes nothing. So as a replacement for spending time with one's child and paying attention to them most of the time, someone invented the "child time-out" as a form of punishment instead. This is not an acceptable trade-off and that's why child time-outs are bad. They're still better than physical abuse of course. -- Ark

Getting the parent to cool off, as when they're angry enough to administer a brutal spanking, is a desireable side-effect of the approach. The object is, as practioners of the time-out technique believe, to teach the children good behavior. I concede, of course, that for abusive parents the technique (of putting either oneself or one's child in time-out) provieds valuable cooling-off time for the parent. Thus an excellent rule-of-thumb for a violent person is: if you feel like hitting a kid, put him in time-out immediately.
My experience using time-out as a Sunday-school teacher, babysitter, and father of two: whatever I put them in time out for, occurs less and less to the point of extinction. I took over a class of a dozen unruly kids, which took nearly half the time of two grown women to control. Within 5 weeks of Sundays, I had those kids "eating out of my hand" (as one parent remarked). I was inspired by watching Kindergarten Cop to be unfailing strict in discipline, but I used only time-out. Aside from disobeying the teacher, the 3 main no-no's were: hitting (someone), grabbing (something from someone), or teasing. I included talking to or about a student in time-out, as "teasing." My class eventually grew so big that my friend Phillip suggested splitting it in half (he took the older kids). By that time, about 5 or 6 dozen kids in my church from the NYC metro area were calling me Uncle Ed. And it all came from being strict with time-out.

-- Ed Poor, Tuesday, June 11, 2002

Consistency is of paramount importance, of course, and I much prefer that word to "strict".

There are many things which parents do which are abusive. There are many seemingly innocuous lines of justification they give for their actions which are anything but. I recall a parent who bemoaned their child's getting her church clothes dirty. The justification for punishing the child was that she had to "learn" to keep her clothes clean. This was very suspect because the parent was acting out of selfish motives; to not be embarrassed in public.

I consider kindergarten, nurseries and other such mass child care to be faintly wrong. If you used child time-out to get through the experience with a minimum of harm to the children, then this justifies your use of the technicque. But it doesn't justify the technique itself. I have ethical and moral misgivings to any parenting technique with the connotations of "training". -- Ark

Thank you for your thoughtful and thought-provoking comments. I'm going to print out this page and read it on the train home tonight. See ya. -- Ed Poor, Tuesday, June 11, 2002