Your pediatrician recommended it, your friends swear by it, and your child’s preschool uses it incessantly. But, every time YOU try to send your child to time-out, the 5-minute time-out turns into a 30-minute throwdown of epic proportions.
For most parents, using time-out to “teach kids a lesson” often increases the power struggle and ends in frustration, anger, and fails to achieve the desired outcome.
Or, in other cases, getting the child to go to time-out isn’t necessarily a battle, but the child continues to misbehave once their time in the corner is finished.
While well-meaning parents have used time-out as an alternative to more punitive methods like spanking, it doesn’t seem to reap the long-term benefits we hope for. After all, we are running a marathon, aren’t we?
When we take a short-sighted approach to discipline, we leave the door open for long-term problems. Sure, a time-out might curb behavior in the moment, but it doesn’t promote our long-term goal of raising emotionally stable, resilient, and empathetic children.
If you are a proponent of time-out, this is not a finger-waving post of judgment, I promise. I, too, was once a time-out queen myself. But, as I found the tool to be increasingly ineffective in my home, I knew I needed other tactics.
