Time Outs Are Dated and Ineffective

This week’s article is Time Outs Are a Dated and Ineffective Parenting Strategy, and it’s a follow-up to last week’s summary on attention and motivation.

While the article is written for parents, it relates to the classroom as well.

As we all know, the goal of parenting (or classroom management) is to be firm and fair: not permissive on one extreme or authoritarian on the other but what behavior experts refer to as authoritative.

The job of a parent/teacher (authority) is to establish parameters/rules/norms/expectations and the job of kids/students is to learn to navigate and make good decisions within those societal/family/classroom limits.

Most of us make the right decision most of the time and positively behave and interact with others within expected parameters, but most of us also on occasion exceed the limits and need help/guidance/reminding/understanding how our actions adversely affect others and even ourselves. Ideally we self-correct but as we all know learning to be self-reflective and regulatory requires much practice and experience. Character skill and habit development requires as much attention and reinforcement as cognitive development.

Unfortunately when the consequence of misbehavior is something punitive like a time out we are more likely to blame others rather than ourselves for our indiscretions and missteps.

At my previous school I team-taught an eighth grade Language Arts class. As we were a Responsive Classroom school, the recommendation for a student who stepped out of line in the classroom was a ‘re-group.’ When a teacher saw a student acting inappropriately, he/she in a calm but foreceful voice told the child to ‘re-group’. The student didn’t move to a time out location or leave the room or go to see the Division Head; rather, a re-group served as a warning that the child needed to correct this misbehavior and had the opportunity to self-correct.

You can imagine a group of cynical eighth grade teachers first hearing about this type of classroom management strategy from an outside consultant: raised eyebrows, scowls, and harrumphs.

Yet as we discussed (proactively and reactively), practiced, and modeled re-grouping among ourselves and with our students and then began to use it in earnest, classroom behavior improved tremendously, removed any power struggle from the teacher-student relationship, and most kids learned quickly to modify their behavior without need for a further consequence, like leaving the classroom or seeing an administrator. In this way the student had a choice of how to he/she would behave next and that empowerment made a huge difference.

As I mentioned last week, it can be tough in the heat of the moment to remain calm, but we always need to remember that improving children’s behavior needs to include personal autonomy and choice.

Joe

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The timeout technique, used by parents for decades, exploded into the public domain in the early 2000s thanks to TV’s “Supernanny” who rebranded it as the “naughty step” technique. Many parents still rely on timeouts when their kids misbehave. A growing number of experts, though, advise against it.

Timeout involves placing your child in a designated quiet, isolated, safe place in the home immediately after they’ve ignored a warning to stop misbehaving. After a brief explanation for why they’re in timeout, the child sits there long enough to calm down and think about what they’ve done wrong.  The recommendation for children 2-6 is keeping them there for one minute per year of age, and ignoring them while they are there. If they leave the spot before time is up, you must take them back, as often as necessary — while refusing to engage in any conversation. When the timer goes off, you reiterate why they were there, tell them to apologize for their behavior and give them hugs and kisses so they know you still love them.

Parenting experts have criticized the timeout technique in recent years, saying that it might neglect a child’s emotional needs. Most experts agree that punishment is harmful to a child’s emotional development and that isolation — the defining quality of the timeout technique — is a form of punishment.

“Children experience feelings of isolation and abandonment when placed in time out,” says one child/adolescent therapist. “There is loss of contact, which can also be interpreted as loss of a parent’s love, especially for younger children. Kids who are sent to their room often believe their isolation is a result of being bad enough that parents do not want to be around them.”

This can be particularly risky for kids who have a predisposition to anxiety. The isolation may increase their fears, and the more anxious they become, the more likely they may be to exhibit behavioral outbursts, such as destroying their toys or room during a timeout.

“Healthy humans are social creatures,” one psychiatrist says. “We rely on others for physical survival and emotional support, which means when we are involuntarily cut off from other human beings, psychologically painful feelings of loneliness and anxiety arise. In children, this is amplified by their belief that they are helpless in the world without their parents to help them. The threat of separation from those who protect them can cause severe anxiety and psychological discomfort in a child.”

This means regular reliance on the timeout technique can have long-lasting negative effects. A child who experiences frequent threats of (or actual) abandonment by their parent will build a model of the world in which they have no firm anchor of support. They have learned they must conform to the views of others in order to survive, and are thus more likely to grow up feeling insecure and powerless.

There’s also the argument that timeout simply doesn’t work. “Kids don’t have the advanced cognitive skills to think abstractly,” says a pediatrician. “Emotional modulation and regulation occurs with development of the prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain which doesn’t fully develop until adolescence.” This means putting a child by themselves in a timeout situation and telling them to think about what they’ve done is generally a waste of time. “If you ask the child why they are in timeout, they usually say ‘I don’t know.”

So what’s the alternative?

Many parenting experts advocate “time-in” as a healthier behavior strategy. It involves sitting with your children when they misbehave, talking them through their emotions and helping them to learn to harness those big feelings they don’t yet understand.

To help a child grasp why their behavior is not appropriate, try to go to the child’s eye level, speak in a calm, soft voice, explain what the child is doing and why they shouldn’t do it, and suggest an acceptable alternative.

There may still a place for a variation on the timeout technique in parenting, though. Some kids can be overstimulated or overwhelmed by the emotions of those around them, which may lead them to respond in ways that can be misconstrued as defiance or misbehavior. However, if timeouts are used as a way to give the child a calmer environment, the parent should remain with the child at all times, and maintain a calm, loving demeanor to help them calm down.