Talk:Child time-out
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[edit] Parent time-out
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
Well, Ark, we certainly have identified where we disagree. That is an excellent starting point for an article on child rearing (or child care perhaps).
You describe child time-out as a technique that enabled me to get through my experience, but which is only justified to the extent that it inflicted minimum harm on the children. Am I restating your view correctly?
I found I had 3 alternatives:
- Let the two ladies run the class, frequently yelling at the children to maintain order, or
- Take over the class and yell at the children myself, or
- Put the unruly children in time-out.
No doubt you can suggest other alternatives, but these were the ones that I considered at the time (over ten years ago).
The result of my consistently applying the time-out technique was that my class became very orderly. The children did not:
- get hit, kicked, pushed, knocked down, etc., by anyone
- did not have their seats, turns, belongings or resources grabbed from them by anyone
- did not get teased by anyone
That is to say, the unruly behaviors diminished to the point of near-extinction. More than once, an entire 2-hour class would go by without my placing a single child in time-out. They had, I believed, internalized the rules.
I applied these rules to myself as well, and a couple of times I (rather dramatically) placed myself in time-out for an infraction. I've often wondered whether making the rules universal (i.e., applying to the rule-giver as well as to the ruled) gave me an edge.
Anyway, I found to my surprise and delight that, despite being then a bachelor with hardly any experience with kids, I could handle over a dozen children at once. Moreover, they themselves seemed to enjoy my classes.
Have I hit on something useful and valuable, or was I deluding myself while creating an evil empire like the Pied Piper of Hamelin? I look forward to more discussion on these points, especially if it provides material for more Wikipedia articles!
Ed Poor, Friday, June 14, 2002
Here's an interesting bit about the effects of inconsistent parenting. From EurekAlert:
The study, published in the journal's June issue, found that 60 percent of people lied at least once during a 10-minute conversation and told an average of two to three lies.
...
The lies the students told varied considerably, according to Feldman. Some were relatively minor, such as agreeing with the person with whom they were speaking that they liked someone when they really did not. Others were more extreme, such as falsely claiming to be the star of a rock band.
"It's so easy to lie," Feldman said. "We teach our children that honesty is the best policy, but we also tell them it's polite to pretend they like a birthday gift they've been given. Kids get a very mixed message regarding the practical aspects of lying, and it has an impact on how they behave as adults."
Santa is a lie. So is "little Billy went away to this magical place called Heaven". I hate it when people lie to children. I especially hate it when they feel justified about it.
[edit] Applying the technique. I couldn't stop smiling
Is this an encyclopedia topic or a do it yourself article? cuz the applying the technique seems to spring out as a naive way of teaching punishments. Not that i'm for or against its inclusion, just found it funny on reading it.--Idleguy 09:47, Jun 23, 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Americanism
Can someone please clarify on the page that this is an American practice (similar things may be done in other parts of the world or indeed the Anglosphere, but I don't believe they traditionally involve the same degree of regimentation or the use of such incredibly cringe-worthy terminology).
If I said "Take 5" to my child I would (quite rightly) be laughed at for sounding like a sports coach from some American television sitcom. --Breadandcheese 16:54, 1 December 2005 (UTC)
[edit] Rename to "time-out (child)"?
I think this page should maybe be moved to time-out (child), with additional redirects set from time-out (parenting) and time-out (education), because:
- It allows editors to use the implicit piping of
[[time-out (child)|]]with an empty pipe resolving to "time-out" without the parenthetical content -- rather than having to type[[child time-out|time-out]] - It is the standard Wikipedia naming scheme, in part because of the above point, and thus easier to remember
-- 62.147.37.94 17:48, 11 August 2006 (UTC)
