Emma 00:00
Hi, I’m Emma, and I’m listening from the UK. We all want our children to lead fulfilled lives, but we’re surrounded by conflicting information and clickbait headlines that leave us wondering what to do as parents. The Your Parenting Mojo podcast distills scientific research on parenting and child development into tools parents can actually use every day in their real lives with their real children. If you’d like to be notified when new episodes are released and get a free infographic on the 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one, just head on over to yourparentingmojo.com/subscribe, and pretty soon you’re going to get tired of hearing my voice read this intro, so come and record one yourself at yourparentingmojo.com/recordtheintro.

Jen Lumanlan 00:46
Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Today we have the second of our two-part series on timeouts, which was inspired by a question from listener Melissa. Here’s Melissa’s question again, just to refresh your memory.

Melissa 00:58
Hi, Jen. I have a question about timeouts. So my understanding is that timeouts are not great because timeouts are punitive and they’re socially isolating, and they’re often used when a child is dysregulated and the child actually needs connection and understanding. But then I read a blog post by Dan Siegel, who authored the whole brain child, and he alludes that there may actually be a potentially appropriate use of time outs when used as part of an intentional parenting strategy. So I’m a little confused. I’d like to know if there is such a thing as a good and appropriate use of time out, especially for things like misbehavior, rather than in response to emotions or tantrums, and is there a way of using a timeout that is effective? It might actually be an appropriate strategy in the respectful parents toolbox. Thank you so much.

Jen Lumanlan 01:50
In the first episode of this two part series, we looked at the research on the effectiveness of timeout and saw that timeout can be effective at changing children’s behavior in a lab environment, particularly, but that parents training programs to use it in the real world are always linked to broader parenting interventions to make parent-child interactions more positive. Most of the research on time out is done with children who have pretty severe behavioral challenges and whose parents are likely struggling with a child’s behavior. We saw that while the research does show that time out can create more compliance in children, that it does this by withholding parents love and affection for a period of time.
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Go to yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers to sign up for the waitlist so we can let you know, as soon as enrollments open, and if you want to get a taster of what the workshop is like before it opens, sign up for a free masterclass on Why You’re So Angry With Your Child’s Age Appropriate Behavior And What To Do About It. You can watch the pre-recorded masterclass whenever it’s convenient for you, and then join me for Q and A and live coaching on Thursday, February 6, from 10 to 11:30 am Pacific. Sign up for that at your parentingmojo.com./triggersmasterclass. Unless you’ve been trained in administering time out by a clinician, you’re probably not doing it in the way that clinicians recommend, and they’re pretty adamant that it has to be done in the way they recommend if you want to see the benefit. We also looked at whether children might be harmed by the use of time out, and found that while there’s no research indicating they are harmed, that the absence of evidence on this topic does not constitute an evidence of absence, as it were. It’s possible that we aren’t looking for the right kinds of harm, or looking for them in the right way. In this episode, we’re going to take a closer look at the idea of using timeout specifically in response to our child’s misbehavior, rather than to their emotional distress, which researchers agree we shouldn’t do. We’ll end by considering, is timeout ever an appropriate tool in a respectful parent’s toolbox? And if not, what kinds of tools are we going to use instead? A very clearly written and helpful paper by Dr. Alina Morawska at the University of Queensland, who has apparently been recognized as Australia’s top scholar in Family Studies, says that, “It is important to differentiate discipline situations from those which are either emotionally upsetting for the child or ones that activate the attachment system. Attachment has been conceptualized in terms of self-regulation, where attachment behaviors represent strategies for maximizing proximity to the caretaker, for facilitating comforting and as a way to regulate distress. Attachment behaviors are not the same as misbehavior, and the parent needs to respond differently to these. Time Out is used for child behaviors which are inappropriate and when the child has not complied with the parental instruction.” This intersection between the hurt a child experiences and when a timeout is appropriate to use is at the heart of Melissa’s second question on whether we should use time out in response to misbehavior. The broader literature is an agreement with Dr Morawska in that time out should not be used in times of emotional distress, but this relies on the parent accurately being able to identify emotional distress. In our culture, we tend to accept sad crying as an indicator of emotional distress, but not angry crying. As they try to explain precisely for whom time out is appropriate and inappropriate, Doctors Lieneman and McNeil describe a young toddler who takes a candy bar in the checkout aisle at a grocery store. Mom takes the candy bar out of the child’s hands and puts it back. The child has tantrum, which they say is understandable because maybe the child doesn’t understand why the parent isn’t allowing the candy. They then substitute a seven year old into the same situation who engages in a “defiant tantrum despite having adequate cognitive and communication abilities”. So ultimately, what they’re saying is that if the parent firstly understands the source of the behavior and secondly judges that behavior to be reasonable, then time out isn’t appropriate. So because we know that a one year old can’t fully comprehend the reason for our no, we understand the source of their crying and we excuse it, or if we think the source of their crying is reasonable, we won’t punish them for it, like if a parent is gone for an extended period of time and the child misses them, a timeout would be clearly inappropriate in this case. Here, I want to link in the ideas from Episode 226, and 227, on where emotions come from and why it matters with Dr. Lisa Feldman Barrett. In those episodes, we learned that we really aren’t very good at understanding what other people are thinking and feeling. Autistic people have a reputation for not being able to infer people’s thoughts and feelings from their facial expressions, and while neurotypical people tend to think they’re much better at doing this than autistic people are, the evidence shows otherwise. We also tend to be much more understanding of people’s situations when we have more context about them. I demonstrated that in episode 207 on how to not be a permissive parent with listener Diana. As we explored the reasons why her child is using what Diana perceives to be a rude tone. Okay? So then, if I can translate that, what I’m hearing you say is that the percentage of time when she’s actually, genuinely, really dysregulated is relatively small, and that more of the time it seems as though she is speaking to you in this way because she’s making a choice.

Diana 08:00
It’s been a successful strategy for her so far in life.

Jen Lumanlan 08:02
Okay, okay,all right, so let’s, let’s go into that piece, right? And so I want to play a little a game to try and illustrate some of this, right? So if I was to say to you, you know, Diana, I think you’re just wrong about this, right? I do. I just think you’re wrong. You’re not saying this. Clearly, you don’t know what you’re talking about. And if you’ve, if you actually listen to the more recent episodes of the podcast, you would see that right, that there are different ways of interacting that would be more beneficial. So how would you describe the way I just spoke to you?

Diana 08:30
Dismissive.

Jen Lumanlan 08:31
Sure, yes, disrespectful. Maybe, sure, yes, yeah. Okay, sure. Okay. So what I want to do here is just sort of to illustrate the idea that the labels that we put on these things are not necessarily about the words that are spoken, right? If I was to come to this conversation and say, well, actually, you know, my husband just learned that he got laid off this morning, and I have no idea how we’re going to pay our bills next month, and I’m feeling scared and distracted and overwhelmed, right? And so if I explained that to you, what would be different about how you perceived the outburst that I just had right then?

Diana 09:05
It gives the context of knowing that where you are coming from was not about me and our interaction at all, really. It was about something different.

Jen Lumanlan 09:15
Yeah, it was about something that happened in my life, right? That there isn’t really anything to do with you. And so the hypothesis that I want to raise is that perhaps there’s something similar going on for your daughter, and that we put this label of disrespect on it. Right? You initially used the word dismissive in the way that I spoke to you, and then I said disrespect, and you agree that, yes, it probably was disrespectful. And so you put that label on the way I spoke to you, because you perceived that a certain set of things was happening with me, and then once you knew different things were happening with me, all of a sudden, it didn’t seem dismissive and disrespectful, right? Okay, so, yeah, I can see you’re having a reaction to that. Let me pause and see what that reaction is.

Diana 09:55
Well, there is some sense in which the comment you specifically. Still was dismissive or disrespectful, I just can now understand why that wasn’t not taken personally, right? Yeah, and so I think that that makes a lot of sense, and we should all look for those opportunities to realize, okay, this isn’t actually about about this right now. This is about something else. And absolutely, some of the time, that’s true in all of our communication with one another. It’s not always about what it seems to be about. So I think it’s definitely right to look for what you know, what is really going on in my own, in my daughter’s mind, in my mind, what are each of our needs?

Jen Lumanlan 10:35
So let’s put all of these pieces together. What if we are misreading our child’s so called inappropriate behavior as willful disobedience, when actually it’s distress? Let’s look at some examples of this. You might remember a parent, Claire, whose parents used time out when Claire was young and later tried to ground her from sneaking out of the house for drinking and for smoking marijuana. We met her in the previous episode on Time out. Time Out is the temporary removal of positive reinforcement from the child’s primary attachment figure and grounding is essentially the same thing once the child realizes they can’t get their need to be seen and known and understood met by their parents, and instead try to get it from their friends. Claire told us how she felt isolated and that nobody understood or cared for her. Her behavior looked out of control, though, to an outsider, her drinking and her drugging must be reined in, in case she ends up dropping out of school and in jail. Time out or grounding, seems like a logical and appropriate response under Dr Morawska’s guidelines. But if we consider things from Claire’s perspective, we see an attachment behavior. Claire is drinking and drugging to try to meet her need for belonging through interactions with her peers, because she had already learned through time outs and other interactions with her parents when she was younger that they couldn’t really understand her. So if the drinking and drugging is attachment, behavior is time out and grounding, an appropriate parental response? Another example of inappropriate behavior comes from Dr Parsi, and it was Dr Morawska’s mention of running away in the street that reminded me of this incident from our conversation in episode 213.

Dr. Houri Parsi 12:13
There was a day where Everest had been to the doctor with her dad, and the situation required some authoritative control that she was not happy with, which was that the nanny and and her dad took Orion and Everest, and the nanny held and had to restrain them for their vaccinations, their shots. She held the nanny held Orion and Travis, her father held her, and apparently she was very upset. She wasn’t ready for it. She was very scared. He restrained her, and she got the shots, and then had a major, major meltdown afterward. And so that evening, we were chatting about a little bit, and I said, you know, honey, I heard that you had a really bad time at the doctor’s office today. And she said, Yeah, I did. And I was really mad. And I said, Well, that’s surprising, because you last couple times I took you, you didn’t even crack anything. And she said, Yeah, but this time, you know, I was upset, and I and I hid after and I said, Where did you hide? She goes, I hid in the street. And I said, Why? Why would you do that? She said, I just had an urge to do something dangerous. And I said, Why would you do that? That’s not like you. And she said, I think I just wanted to make daddy worried. And I was like, Well, why did you want to do that? She said, you know, Mom, it’s kind of just like a punishment, like when you really want to get it through to someone, because he made me feel scared and worried, and so I want to make him feel scared, like just the candidness with which she could be, like, you know, it’s vengeance, mom.

Jen Lumanlan 13:48
Like, okay, how old is she?

Dr. Houri Parsi 13:50
She’s six. Six. Yeah, and, I mean, just and I hadn’t said, I didn’t say, do you think you were mad at dad? Do you think? No, I didn’t feed her any of it. Yeah. She was like, I acted out in this non, out of character way, because I was trying to get through to my father, because he put me in a state of anxiety and fear, and I couldn’t get through to him that he made me feel this way. So I tried to create that same feeling in him right through this the way that I was acting out.

Jen Lumanlan 14:15
So here again, we have behavior running away in the street that most researchers would clearly define as misbehavior that should be addressed using time out. But because Dr. Parsi’s daughter is so articulate, we can see inside the mind of this child, and imagine that maybe similar things are going on inside the minds of other children who are less willing or able to say this kind of thing to their parents, and know that maybe this kind of behavior is about emotional dysregulation as well. We could even imagine the seven-year-old on the trip to the grocery store who’s told they can’t have a candy and try to understand what else might be happening in that child’s life. Maybe the child has a new sibling, and the parents are feeling exhausted and overwhelmed and hardly ever get to spend any time with the seven-year-old, and suddenly the seven-year-old wonders if their parents even still love them anymore. They just about keep a lid on their distress throughout the day, until we get to the grocery store, which is a dysregulating environment with lots of noise and bright lights and things to look at. And we make it through the store, and we reach for a candy bar, and our parent wrenches it out of our hand and says, no. Could we imagine, in that case that this would be the last straw, and that all of the hurt and frustration of what was happening in the rest of our lives might come rushing out? And if our parent can’t see all of the distress under what looks like misbehavior, they end up punishing us for the very thing they said that wasn’t appropriate to use time out for, which is emotional dysregulation and attachment behavior because we so desperately want to feel loved by our parent. The researchers say that “It is important to recognize the kinds of behaviors that time out is recommended for, including aggression, tantrums and non-compliance, and not a strategy to be used for when the child is sad or anxious. But why not? What is it about sadness or anxiousness that makes those better emotions that aren’t punishable by time out? Is it just because sadness and anxiousness are generally less inconvenient for us parents? If we saw so called aggression, tantrums and non-compliance as cries for help as well, would we handle it differently if we look back to the framework of needs that we use here on the show and that I describe in my book, Parenting Beyond Power, we can see that these children have a need for safety and belonging, and that time out doesn’t really seem to be appropriate in these situations. So are there ever times when timeout is appropriate? I went back to Melissa and asked her, what kind of misbehavior was she thinking about when she asked about whether the timeout was appropriate, she replied with two main categories of behavior. Firstly, what she called boundary testing and willful behavior. She says these are situations where a toddler is just being mischievous. To give some real examples. For instance, you tell a toddler not to try to poke your face, and they poke your face. You redirect their hands, and they keep doing it. Or they’re throwing a toy across the room. You tell them to stop, and they keep doing it because they think it’s funny. They drop food on the floor during dinner, even though they’re old enough to know that they’re not supposed to do it. It doesn’t seem as though the child is distressed in these cases. So should we just use time out? I would argue that the answer here is no, because we can identify the child’s likely need for a toddler connection is always a good first guess for a reason why a child is doing something we don’t like. If they’re poking our face, they’re probably trying to engage with us. They want to play with us. We could put them in timeout, or we could say, I don’t want to be poked. Are you trying to get my attention? And then do something like rolling a soft ball to them so their hands are engaged with something else, and their need for connection is met, and so is our need for physical safety. If they’re throwing a toy across the room and we’ve asked them not to do it many times, they probably know this is a fast and easy way to get our attention. Again they’re looking for connection. You can say, I don’t want you to throw hard toys. Are you trying to tell me you want to play? You could throw a soft toy across the room to each other, or engage them in another game, or take a throwing game outside. Dropping food on the floor may also be a way to get your attention, and it has probably worked well in the past. Or it may just be that the child feels bored and frustrated that they’re done with dinner, but they’re still stuck in their high chair or at the table if you have a role that they have to ask permission before leaving. You might try involving the child in the conversation to the extent that’s possible, letting them leave the dinner table or having them eat earlier so you can pay attention to them while they eat and then eat later yourself. The second kind of behavior that Melissa wanted to know about is highly undesirable and unsafe behavior. She says her child is three and a half so he knows he’s not supposed to hit or push or pull hair on people, but still does. Sometimes it’s out of frustration or impulse, which she tries to teach him to manage, she says. But sometimes he does things just because, for instance, he will be sitting next to his sister and then just pull her hair. Melissa tells him to stop and he doesn’t. Or recently, he’s been half kicking his sister, perhaps out of boredom to see her reaction, or because it’s fun. I think there could be a few potential needs going on here. Firstly, it could, once again, be that the child is looking for a connection with Melissa, if he has learned that hitting his sister draws her attention quickly and reliably. So in that case, our strategy is going to be to get more connection time with him. You might think you’re getting enough connection time already if you’re around each other all the time, but there really is something about 10 minutes of daily, predictable one on one play that you call special time, or something similar, that just seems to fill children’s cups in a way that generally being around each other doesn’t do. So that would be a first thing strategy to try, and you may well find that it shifts things in a really positive way over and above the sibling hitting. You would also be shocked at how many young children hit their sibling as a way to ask if the other child wants to play. It seems so obvious to us that a child who you’ve just hit probably isn’t going to want to play with you. But for young children, for some reason, this does not seem obvious at all. If hitting gets our attention, why wouldn’t it also work on a sibling? Maybe that’s the logic. If that’s what’s happening, you can teach a child how to ask their sibling to play. You can model saying, Do you want to play? And you can teach the other child how to respond. For example, yes, yes, but not right now. Yes, but not that game. I’d rather play this game. And no thank you. In this instance, it seems as though it’s a younger sitting hitting an older one. So these would be my first suggestions for trying to handle it. If the situation was reversed and an older sibling was hitting a younger one, I would be taking a much closer look at the relationship between the parent and the child doing the hitting. I’ve definitely seen children threaten to hit and hit siblings and parents, as well as a way of trying to communicate, I see my younger sibling get a lot more love and attention and affection than I seem to get, and I feel lonely and hurt and angry, and I don’t know how to express it. It’s so easy to perceive this behavior as something inappropriate, something to be stopped, just as parent Diana perceived my dismissiveness of her in the exercise on permissive parenting that we looked out in the last episode, and that’s what time out allows and even encourages us to do. It says the only problem here is with the child’s behavior, not with our relationship. But if we back up and see the context behind the child’s behavior, just as we would wish a person who loves us would take in the context of our behavior into account when we say things we don’t mean or do things we aren’t proud of, we may well find that suddenly time out not only seems inappropriate but potentially harmful, not just to the child but to our relationship. One of the papers on time out gets us tantalizingly close to this kind of understanding, it says, “A careful functional analysis of the problem behavior is a recommended part of a behavior management program to determine the reason for the child’s inappropriate behavior. The child’s needs have to be addressed. The child needs to understand what is expected of them, and the expectations should be developmentally appropriate, and the child’s emotions need to be suitably addressed. However, if the family environment and parenting strategies contribute to the child’s problem behavior, parents require appropriate evidence based strategies, including time out to manage the behavior more effectively.” So in other words, even though these researchers likely don’t understand needs in the same way that we do. What they’re saying is we should try to address our children’s needs and not ask them to do things they can’t do. But if it’s the family environment and parenting strategies that are causing the child’s misbehavior, then the best thing to do is not to change those things, but to give a timeout. The problem is in what the parents are doing, but the child is responsible for changing their behavior to make it seem like there isn’t a problem anymore.

Jen Lumanlan 22:49
So in answering Melissa’s second question on whether timeouts are appropriate for misbehavior, we’ve also neatly answered her third question on whether a timeout can ever be an appropriate strategy in a respectful parent’s toolbox. And I have to say that in the vast, vast majority of cases, I believe the answer is no, because there is no evidence that it isn’t harmful, and because it’s not necessary. When we work to understand the need our child is trying to meet, and we help them to meet that need, there’s no reason to use a time out. So is this always the case? I’ve been thinking a lot about Dickey over the last few days. He was the child that we met at the opening of the first of the two episodes in this series, and I’m trying to imagine myself in his parent’s shoes, as a parent of a child who’s engaging in so much self harming behavior during tantrums, and whose doctor has said he might go blind in six months if he doesn’t wear glasses, would I use time out in this case? It’s hard to put myself exactly in dickey’s parents’ shoes, because we don’t know what they tried before they put Dickey in the hospital, or before the timeout procedure was put in place. I find it really hard to believe they’d made a serious attempt to understand what about their home life Dickey was finding so stressful that he would cope with by hurting himself, and had made every reasonable attempt to modify his home environment to make it easier for him to cope. We also don’t know if anyone had tried any strategies to help make the glasses more acceptable to him before moving to full-prescription strength lenses. It’s possible that a gradual approach, along with physical modification to make the glasses stay on his face more easily without anyone having to touch him, which he found difficult, could have really helped. His parents could have talked with other parents whose children struggled to wear glasses, or even other adults with the same eye condition who didn’t like wearing glasses when they were a child, to see how their parents handled it, and also how the adults wished their parents had handled it. If all of those things had been tried and we still couldn’t figure it out, then I’d say I probably would have used time out to protect his health and safety, but I would have been constantly on the lookout for reasons why he was hurting himself, why he wouldn’t wear his glasses, and as soon as I found a new reason, I would cut off the timeouts and put a new strategy to address that reason in place. There’s such a huge difference between using time out as a last resort tool when we have genuinely tried everything else we can think of, and using it as a first line parenting tool, where we say, do X, wait five seconds and then say you didn’t do X, so you’re going to timeout. In the end, I believe that scientific research can’t tell us everything that we want to know about whether or not to use timeout, whether or not we use a timeout is ultimately about what kind of relationship we want to have with our children. Certainly, for parents who have abused their children in the past, learning and implementing an emotionally regulated timeout procedure is a giant step in the right direction. Maybe we aren’t abusing our children, although we might still find ourselves frustrated by their behavior, particularly when we’ve told them not to do something 3000 times and they keep doing it anyway, we might find ourselves handling them a little more roughly than we would like on our way to the timeout chair. Even if we implement timeout correctly, when we use timeout to change someone else’s behavior, we are saying I know better than you do. I will judge your behavior, and when your behavior meets my standards, I will reward you with love and belonging and acceptance. When your behavior does not meet my expectations, I will remove my love and belonging acceptance until your behavior does meet my expectations.

Jen Lumanlan 26:22
And if timeout was really so great, why don’t we all use it? Why don’t couples therapists recommend that I put my husband in timeout when I don’t like what he’s doing so he changes his behavior? Why don’t experts say that he should put me in timeout on a day when we’ve been to two noisy holiday parties, and autism makes me extremely noise sensitive, so I feel completely overwhelmed, and I snapped at him? Aren’t I just exhibiting artistic behaviors of a defiant adult to play on the title of a paper we looked at in the last episode that saw children’s autism linked behavior as behavior from a defiant child? Am I only not defiant because I’m an adult and not a child? Both the US Centers for Disease Control and the American Academy of Pediatrics recommend behavioral parent training, which incorporates time out as a first line treatment for children with ADHD. The AAP even recommends this approach for children younger than five who demonstrate symptoms of ADHD but are too young to be diagnosed. So why isn’t time out a recommended strategy for the partners of adults with ADHD to help the adult with ADHD control their symptoms? It’s because if we see a person as fully competent and able to consent, we don’t use time out. We only use time out with children, especially autistic kids, and kids with ADHD, and kids with developmental delays. We use it with people who don’t have the power to resist. The only adult I found in the literature who had been subjected to time out procedure was a 58-year-old woman who lived in a large state hospital in the 1960s and who used a wheelchair. She had cursed and yelled at staff members for years, so some researchers implemented a time out procedure with her, where she was removed from her wheelchair and put on the floor facing the wall in a two-minute timeout whenever she yelled with a 15-second quiet period required at the end for her release. There’s no indication that anyone ever listened to this woman and asked what was going on with her, and if they had, maybe they would have found she felt lonely in the hospital, away from her family, and frustrated that she had to rely on other people to get every single thing from her that she wanted. We have no information on how she came to use a wheelchair, because in behaviorism, this kind of background is irrelevant. The researchers concluded that “Ruth learned that if she simply sat quietly, most of her needs would be met in a short while. In addition, she would occasionally raise her hand and whisper a request to an attendant. The screaming, shouting and loud cursing which the staff had tolerated for years, thus came under control of this combination of time out and reinforcement for appropriate behavior.” I find it helps me to see parenting practices a lot more clearly when we imagine them being used on adults and even see them being used on adults. I felt horrified when I read this particular study, but this is exactly the same procedure as is described by many other studies on children. I’m not saying we should tolerate any behavior another person feels like dishing out, but we’re having a if we’re having a crappy day and we speak aggressively to someone we love, wouldn’t we want them to try and understand what’s going on for us, instead of simply punishing us for acting out? Our children want the same thing, because our children are people, too. In our last episode, we spent a good deal of time looking at parent child interaction therapy, which trains parents to use time out as part of a package of methods, including praise, playing together, making eye contact and body contact. One of the key findings on the effects of PCIT on families is that caregivers emotion regulation increases, which presumably makes their parenting more predictable, which supports the children’s emotion regulation. So what if we support parents in improving their self-regulation first, instead of defaulting to giving time out? PCIT meets children’s needs for connection with parents by teaching parents how to play with their children in positive way, and then it assumes that any other needs children have besides connection are irrelevant. If they protest not getting their needs in the met, they should be punished.

Jen Lumanlan 30:10
A few months ago, I coached a parent in the Taming Your Triggers workshop who was feeling triggered by a child’s behavior, and she’s allowed me to share her story with you. She wants to remain anonymous, so I’m going to recall her Kendra. So Kendra’s 11-year-old had diagnoses for ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Mornings were always a struggle, as her younger eight-year-old would bounce out of bed with a cheery good morning, and then the 11-year-old would reply, go away. And then that set the tone for the rest of the day. He would struggle with getting dressed and getting ready, and the kids would fight over the bathroom, and sometimes the two kids would leave on their bikes to school and reappear at home 10 minutes later because they fought so much along the way. So Kendra is feeling stressed, overwhelmed, because she’s trying to take work calls, but it seems like her personal and work lives are just colliding every day. And Kendra would often end up saying things she wasn’t proud of and that were not aligned with her values, because it seemed like there was no other way to get her son moving and out the door every day. I coached Kendra one day on a call to help her see things from her son’s perspective, and she cried while we were talking as she thought of her son waking up with such disappointment and having to rush through his morning routine. She also thought about her own unmet needs, both today and when she was a child. When Kendra was young, she would get herself and her little brothers dressed and out of the house. So it isn’t surprising she was having a hard time when her 11 year old was struggling just to get himself ready. Kendra wanted so badly to receive support and care from her parents in the mornings as well, and at first there was some resistance. When I suggested that maybe she could help him, she felt resentful because the little girl inside of her was screaming, I didn’t get support like that when I was his age, I had to figure it out for myself. So at his age, he should be able to figure it out for himself. The little kid inside of her was fighting her real-life kid today, and she thought, I really don’t want to do this. I don’t want to help him. I want to find another way to get him to do his morning tasks. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized the idea of her supporting her son was aligned with her values, and suddenly she saw how healing it could be for both of them to meet his needs in a way that her needs weren’t met when she was young. Actually, it happened two weeks later. We had another coaching call, and on the morning of that call, Kendra woke her son up, came back a few minutes later and said it really is time to get up, and left the room. And a few minutes later she came back and he was still just sitting on the floor, not doing anything. Seems like that would have been a perfect moment for a clearly delivered instruction followed by a timeout to enforce it. Right? Instead, Kendra went into the room and said, what’s going on? Do you need help? And he got up. He walked over to her, gave her a hug and said, No, Mom, I can do it. So he did his morning tasks. The two kids left, but they did come back 10 minutes later, screaming at each other at the top of their lungs, and Kendra said, I don’t know what’s going on. Give me a few minutes to finish my meeting, and I’ll be with you. A couple of minutes later, she’s back in her office. She’s still on the phone. Her son came into the office and slid a note under our monitor, and it said, Mom, I’m so sorry I didn’t get us to school on time. I really wanted to, but my sister made a joke that made me upset, and I needed your help. I’m sorry we interrupted your call. Thank you for giving me grace this morning. Kendra told me, I could have cried. She found it so meaningful because her son was acknowledging her need for competence in her work. They didn’t have time to talk it through right then, but she said, let’s talk about what ideas you have for how we can make tomorrow morning different. When they had that conversation later that evening, it was such a different way of seeing and responding to the challenge that put them all on the same team, instead of parent against kids. And at that point in our conversation, I asked Kendra, do you think your son’s oppositional defiant disorder diagnosis is a valid diagnosis at this point? And she said, No, not at all, not at all. And the main reason for that is my son wasn’t being defiant. That’s what I see now. He wasn’t being defiant. His needs were not being met. Don’t forget to go to yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers so we can let you know when the Taming Your Triggers workshop enrollment opens on February 9. You’ll learn the real sources of your triggered feelings, how to feel triggered less often and practical tools to help you meet both your child’s needs and your needs on a far more regular basis. Sign up for the waitlist now and that special rollback pricing at your parentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers. And I believe the same is true for every child with an odd diagnosis, and for every child who is referred to a program where parents are trained to use time out, and for Melissa’s child and for your child as well, through Taming Your Triggers, Kendra learned how to understand her own needs more clearly, because she realized she’d been putting those on hold to say yes to her children’s requests for years. As she started to understand more about her needs, she saw her needs were not for her son to start getting dressed within five seconds of her saying get dressed in the mornings, but for ease and collaboration and integrity with her values. She also had needs for autonomy and self-care, and she found a great deal of movement on those when she was able to get away for a whole weekend by herself and say yes to anything she felt like doing. She ended up learning how to throw axes at a target. Obviously, she can’t get a whole weekend to herself whenever she wants it. So she’s also found that she can recreate the feeling by engaging in prayer, which is important to her while in a bubble bath. The more Kendra expands her capacity, the more she’s able to be with her child in integrity with her values. She has more curiosity and wants to understand what need of his is behind his resistance. She has more creativity in generating strategies to meet both of their needs, and she’s more willing to consider strategies that he proposes as well. She didn’t do anything to shape his behavior. She didn’t tell him to stop answering back. She never put him in time out. She wants him to be able to advocate for himself, and because of their work together, he can now articulate his needs in a way that she can receive. And because she has more capacity when his capacity is low and he snaps at her, she’s better able to translate his words to understand his underlying needs and help him to meet those so he isn’t oppositional anymore or defiant or disordered, and Kendra isn’t triggered nearly as often either. If you want to start exploring how to use alternatives to time out, I’d suggest beginning with the tell me what my child’s need is quiz at yourparentingmojo.com/quiz. Answer 10 short questions about your child’s behavior, and I’ll tell you their most important need and a whole bunch of suggestions for how you can meet it more regularly. And then your child won’t do as many of the things you’re thinking of using time out for right now. That’s at yourparentingmojo.com/quiz, and if you need some support with your own emotion regulation, so you can start to make the kinds of shifts that will help you to support your child’s emotion regulation as well, just like Kendra did. I’ve helped 1000s of parents do this in the Taming Your Triggers workshop, and I would love to support you as well. You can find out more at yourparentingmojo.com/tamingyourtriggers.

Emma 37:26
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