The Right and Wrong Way to Use Timeouts

Hannah Tennant-Moore — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 16:17:00 GMT

Timeouts seem self-explanatory: your kid acts out; you make him go to his room or sit on a chair in the corner, by force if necessary; the worst the offense, the longer the timeout, right?

Wrong, wrong, wrong, says renowned child psychiatrist Alan E. Kazdin, writing for Slate. While timeouts can be effective, relying too heavily on the timeout as a method of punishment will do nothing to change your child’s problematic behavior. In fact, excessive timeouts worsen bad behavior—which means you give more and longer timeouts, which means your child acts out more, which means your home becomes a battlefield.

To avoid this, Kazdin recommends returning the timeout to its original meaning: a “timeout from reinforcement.” Rather than an angry punishment, the timeout was originally meant to be a simple withholding of attention, since kids tend to repeat behavior that garners attention of any kind. To hope that a timeout will cause a child to “think about what they’ve done” and repent is to be self-delusional.

Instead, use timeouts briefly, calmly, and immediately following the problematic behavior. Timeouts should never be physically enforced—dragging your child to his room, for instance, completely negates all of the timeout’s benefits, which are mostly accrued in the first minute or two of timeout. If your child refuses to cooperate with a timeout, raise the penalty by one minute or take away a privilege. On the other hand, always praise compliance with timeouts.

Kazdin points out (rather obviously, though it’s easy to forget in the heat of the moment when Susie hits her little sister for the third time in an hour) that the most important tool for changing problematic behavior is to actively work on replacing the hitting—or yelling or food throwing or painting on the walls—with positive behavior, through constant reminders and positive reinforcement.

And when that’s not working and all you want to do is lock the little miscreant in his room for 20 minutes, perhaps you need to give yourself a brief timeout from reinforcement.

Photo: hometown9.com

Strollerderby : punishing bad behavior

The Right and Wrong Way to Use Timeouts