Is time-out an effective discipline strategy for children?

No

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by Rachel Howells

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Obviously, as a parent or childcare provider you have to have some tools at your disposal for disciplining unacceptable behavior. Equally obvious, you cannot go around beating them into submission, so what other options are there?

One option that has been eagerly accepted by the general consciousness of the parenting world and saturated in popular culture is the timeout or naughty chair. This method is a trend like any other parenting trend that comes along and sweeps the nation, scaffolded by TV shows like Supernanny and Nanny 911. As parents, we are easily swayed into believing things because they are on TV or written about in popular magazines that we occasionally forget our own common sense.

In keeping an open mind and listening to all the expert advice, we shouldn't forget our own parenting instincts, knowledge of our own unique kids, and our own experiences that might not always ring true with what the experts say.

One problem with any trend that insidiously slithers its way in and around the collective mind is that some of us can take what was perhaps a valid and insightful take on a particular human condition and then rigidly apply this concept to every single situation without taking into consideration all available information and/or contributing factors. In other words, say hello to the Fanatics.

Fanatic zeal can range from absurdity to downright cruelty and the timeout trend has picked up its fair share of absurdly cruel fanatics.

Recently, I witnessed a proponent of the timeout technique who (maybe not a fanatic but definitely a fan) put his kicking and screaming child in a timeout in the middle of a grocery store aisle. The child was about 4 years old and wanted to eat a bag of Oreos right there in the store. The father of course said no and so naturally the 4-year-old threw himself on the floor and proceeded to go into convulsions as he screamed, "I WANT OREOS, I WANT OREOS!"

Clearly, the child was tired and probably hungry, as it was nearing the dinner hour. So probably the best course of action would have been to leave the grocery store, give the kid some dinner, and put him to bed. However, this was not to be as the father, unperturbed by his son's tantrum, laid down in the middle of the aisle beside his son and said, "Jax, this is unacceptable behavior. You will have to go into a time out."

The father then pushed some boxes of crackers aside to create a makeshift naughty chair and physically perched the flailing preschooler on the ledge of the grocery store shelf between the saltines and Cheerios.

"Four minutes," the seemingly unaffected father said before very calmly and deliberately turning his back to the hysterical child. I began to wonder if he was one of those next door sociopath types that Martha Stout discusses in her book, "The Sociopath Next Door." This was quite fascinating to me. How could this man remain so unruffled by his completely out of control child?

Besides that, though, and more to the point, the timeout did not seem to be working.

The boy's tantrum only grew louder as he kept bolting from his makeshift naughty chair, violently flinging boxes of cereal to the floor in the process. Every time Jax bolted his father would easily snatch him up and place him right back on the grocery store shelf. It was like watching a ping-pong match. Jax's energy was spellbinding.

I had to admire the boy's tenacity.

The whole timeout debacle was beginning to attract a crowd and still both father and son stood their ground. The kid continuously violated the timeout rules and made a run for it. The father continuously placed the boy back on the shelf. Finally, mercifully, an ostensibly well-meaning mother and staunch advocate of the timeout strategy purposefully stepped forward from the crowd.

"Can I give you some advice?" she asked in what appeared to be a rhetorical question to the now somewhat distraught father.

His stoic veneer was beginning to crack and right when it looked like he was about to cave and give the kid the entire bag of Oreos just to shut him up, the woman proffered her advice. It seems that this woman, who fervently believed in and practiced the timeout method herself, became alarmed that the father wasn't employing the technique properly and so felt compelled to intervene.

The "well-meaning" lady eyed the father expectedly while Jax continued to go berserk. What was remarkable about this lady was that she shared the same strange, eerie calmness the father initially had at the onset of this whole fiasco.

"Uh," he hesitated not accustomed to being offered parenting advice by a complete stranger in a public place.

"Um, okay," he finally replied weakly as a tiny bead of sweat trickled down his temple.

"Yes, well," the woman knowingly, smugly nodded her head as she inched closer to the father and importantly advised him, "It is imperative when putting your child is in a timeout that you explain explicitly why he is in the timeout and what exactly the unacceptable behavior is," she turned to confidently look at the rest of us in the crowd in an attempt to punctuate her point. She then swiveled back to the man and demanded, "Did you explain to him what the unacceptable behavior was?"

"Uh, yeah I do that...I mean yeah I did that," he flustered.

"Fine," she nodded with approval.

"You then must explain to him that he will remain in timeout for...how old is he?" she suddenly queried with an arched eyebrow and a challenging glare.

We all waited with bated breath for the father to answer her question.

At last he stammered, "Ahum, I don't know." The father simply stood there bewildered, blankly gawking at the woman while intermittently casting glances towards his frenzied son. It was at that point Jax took his father's sudden mental incapacity as an opportunity to make a final run for it and sprinted off down the aisle.

Some of us in the crowd, which by now was more of an audience than a mere crowd, started to cheer.

By now, it was hard not to notice that the well-meaning woman's own two children had joined up with Jax. All three were now racing up and down the aisle, knocking things off shelves, laughing maniacally in unison, and more or less contributing to the overall mayhem.

The father, however, didn't even appear to notice his son's escape or the fact that Jax had acquired some new recruits, so ensnared was he by the woman's penetrating stare. Her intensity was making all of us bystanders a little uncomfortable.

Undaunted by the surrounding chaos, the woman continued to bore into the father with her fervid stare.

"He is what, about four," the woman shrewdly guessed in her now familiar rhetorical manner, unfazed by the father's stupor.

Without waiting for his affirmation, the woman ostentatiously proceeded, "Because he is four he must sit in the timeout for precisely four minutes, at which time he must apologize for his unacceptable behavior."

I am not sure how long this woman lectured the father for, but four minutes can be a long time, especially when you have to keep starting over again a dozen times.

In this case, Jax got up six times before I could finally tear myself away from this sorry display of parenting gone bad. I do not know if the duo was finally kicked out by the manager, the child passed out from pure exhaustion, dad and well-meaning timeout advocate decided to pair up and start their own Time Out Sect, the three children took over in a dramatic Lord of the Flies kind of remake or dad finally admitted defeat and carried the spoiled, satisfied, Oreo smeared child out of the store.

What ever happened, one thing was clear - the timeout strategy is not always the most effective way to deal with difficult behavior in every single situation. Sometimes children behave badly because they are hungry, tired or cold. Sometimes they are under some kind of external stress that they do not have the cognitive or verbal skills to deal with. Sometimes they simply are not developmentally capable of dealing with a situation and consequently act out in those childish ways that drive all parents crazy - whining, tantrums, destruction, disobedience, etc. Sometimes, too, parents have to remember that children are born with a basic temperament and not all temperaments respond in the same way to the same parenting styles or techniques.

So what other choices are there for parental control if you do not want to buy into the timeout craze? One of the most effective methods for getting through to any child is attention. This goes against the whole premise of timeouts, whereby you ignore the child or supposedly the behavior, but in essence you are actually ignoring the child.

A child is much more responsive to an adult that is responsive to them. Babies cry for a reason; it is their form of communication so to simply ignore a baby's cry is to ignore the baby, and to not address the baby's basic needs. This neglect of a child's basic need for security and care has all kinds of possible future repercussions for the child. Most threatening of these is an insecure or weak attachment, which can leave the child vulnerable to all those other evils out there like drugs, high school dropout, legal issues, suicide, sexual promiscuity, teenage pregnancy, depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses.

It is perhaps a taboo thing to say in today's Nanny 911 climate, but if your child is acting like a brat then give him or her some ATTENTION. Ironically, the very act of timeouts can place attention on the very behavior the parent is trying to correct, which in turn works to reinforce the unwanted behavior rather than abolish it. This is because attention is being misdirected onto something rather than nothing. Children flourish in the direct sunlight and rich soil of their parent's attention.

This, however, is not to say children should be allowed to run amuck with no rules or consequences as parents stand idly by admiring their children's free spirit. Society pays just as much of a price for this kind of parental indulgence as it does for parental neglect. This is also not to say that attachment therapy, also known as "holding" or "rebirthing" therapy is sound parenting practice either. Traumatizing children by binding and confining them is even more detrimental to their mental stability and growth than neglect.

In any event, what ever way a parent leans, there is always a middle ground when parenting and there is always room for interpretation and adaptation.

Ultimately, the most important thing to remember when one finds him or herself being pulled into a fanatic school of thought is, to quote Richard Feynman, "Keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out."

Learn more about this author, Rachel Howells.
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