Kelly 00:03
Hi! This is Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. There’s no other resource out there quite like Your Parenting Mojo, which doesn’t just tell you about the latest scientific research on parenting and child development, but puts it into context for you as well, so you can decide whether and how to use this new information if you’d like to get new episodes in your inbox, along with a free infographic on 13 reasons your child isn’t listening to you and what to do about each one. Sign up at your parenting mojo.com/subscribe if you’d like to start a conversation with someone about this episode, or you know someone who would find it useful, please do forward it to them. Thank you so much.

Jen Lumanlan 00:55
Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Before we get started today, on our topic of time outs, I wanted to share a few words from a listener who’s also been in both of the parenting and the learning memberships. She read my book parenting beyond power when it came out over a year ago, and I only just got around to asking her permission to share her thoughts on where the book ranks compared to the 100 or so other books that she’s read. Here’s Theresa.

Theresa 01:20
I’ve just finished your book. Amazing, really good. It was really like, yeah, and I’ll describe it. I was like, I read it, and I was like, yay. It’s like, all there in this really neat book. And I could just, like, refer back to the book, because it’s like, you know, you managed to, like, funnel it all into a really and really easy to read. And really, what’s the word, like reference. Like a reference. I want to just check that thing was that page, and you’re like, Oh yeah, that was that bit. And, like, little scripts. It was, Yes, super helpful. I was gonna say, like, I’ve read probably I’m embarrassed about this or proud of this, but I’ve probably read over 100 parenting and yours rates up there like top five, top five.

Jen Lumanlan 02:04
Thanks so much for the kind words Theresa. Parenting beyond power is available in local bookstores, on Amazon and in audio book format, so you can even hear me read it to you. Now. Let’s hear from listener, Melissa, who asked me a question about time outs. Here’s Melissa, Hi, Jen,

Melissa 02:21
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 timeouts 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 timeout, 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 03:12
What an interesting question to explore. So let’s break down the elements of Melissa’s question so we can address them one by one. In this episode, we’ll look at whether there is a way of using timeout that is effective, which will become an entry to thinking about the origins of timeout and the research available on it. We’ll also look at a related topic, which is whether timeout is harmful in any way to our kids. I tried really hard to fit everything into one episode, but I couldn’t compress it enough to make it listenable. So in our next episode, we’ll look at using timeout in incidences of misbehavior rather than in response to emotions or tantrums, as well as the last part of the question about whether timeout can ever be an appropriate strategy in the respectful parents toolbox. Before we dive into the first formal question, let’s just make sure that we’re on the same page about what timeout is, because it’s described very specifically in the research. Researchers define time out as, “the contingent withholding of the opportunity to earn reinforcement. It consists of time away, usually for one to five minutes from rewarding stimuli, including attention from the parent as a consequence of some form of misbehavior, parents learn a simple routine that requires the child to have conned or settled before being allowed to rejoin the rewarding activity that they’ve been removed from.” Sounds so simple, right? The name time out is a shortened form of the phrase time out from positive reinforcement, which is derived directly from B, F Skinner’s behaviorist theory in the 1940s behaviorists investigated whether they could change pigeons and then chimpanzees behavior by removing access to food when they didn’t do a task, and then they moved on to research on changing children’s behavior. Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re seeing that children view their parents love and attention as a positive thing, which in behavior. Is called a reinforcement, and when we give time out from positive reinforcement, we’re saying that the pigeon or chimp or child doesn’t have an opportunity to access positive reinforcement for a period of time. The procedure was developed for children by Doctor Arthur Stotts in the 1950s who still very much believed in it when he was interviewed for an article in the Washington Post in 2019 he initially tested it on his own daughter, and now they have a family joke that her behavior was so bad that her dad had to invent time out. Longtime listeners to the podcast know that I do a lot of hedging here on the show. There’s a lot of well, the studies say this, and if you squint at the data in just the right way, you can indeed see a statistically significant result in the case of time out, the research is surprisingly unequivocal. I’ll quote from a 2019 paper by Dr Rachel Knight at the University of Michigan Medical School and her colleagues. She says, “time out has been studied for almost six decades, with applied research in children first reported in the 1960s overall, time out has been found to reduce many types of problematic behavior, such as non compliance and oppositionality, aggression, destruction of property and yelling, slash inappropriate vocalizations. Timeout is also a treatment component in several evidence based, manualized parent management training programs. In addition, timeout is effective in addressing problematic behavior across several ages, including infants, toddlers and preschoolers, school aged children and adolescents. Despite the voluminous research on timeouts effectiveness, the popular media frequently portrays time out as harmful, ineffective, or both.” So this is a fairly typical statement that opens a modern paper on time out, and each of the main ideas in it is supported by a citation. So I went through them one by one. The citation for the assertion that time out has been studied for almost six decades with applied research in children first reported in the 1960s is a paper by Montrose Wolf, who was actually Dr starts as graduate assistant. Also other authors on this paper were Todd Risley and Hayden Mills, and this was published in 1963 if the name Todd Risley rings a bell, it’s because he was also involved in the research on the so called 30 million word gap that we looked at in a couple of different episodes. This paper was more about the behaviorist ideas behind time out rather than timeout itself. Though, the researchers behavior space conditioning methods that timeout is related to and how the researchers used these to get a three and a half year old autistic boy named Dickey, who had a slew of other diagnoses as well, to stop having tantrums and start wearing his glasses so his vision wouldn’t be lost. The authors would withheld Dickey’s food until he complied with their demands, rather than making any attempt to understand why he was hurting himself during tantrums and why he wouldn’t wear his glasses. From the researchers perspective, this case was successful, but we have no idea how Dickie turned out in the long term. As far as behaviorist researchers are concerned, once the behavior has changed, there is nothing more of interest to learn or do. We don’t know if the self harming behavior ever returned or if Dickie developed other habits that his parents found difficult. After all, nothing’s changed in the circumstances in their home. The only thing that changed was Dickey’s behavior. If Dickie was self harming as a stress response, it seemed likely that he may have developed other stress response behaviors. Later on, researchers didn’t help Dickie to learn any new tools for managing his stress response, only that when he expressed it, as he had been doing via tantrums in which he hurt himself, that so called privileges like food would be removed. Dr Knight went on to describe the different kinds of behaviors that could be addressed using time out. The first of these were non compliance and oppositionality, aggression and destruction of property, there were two studies cited in support of this claim. In the first one, researchers worked with four children and their parents in a lab setting, parents were told to give children instructions like, come here or give me the truck. Wait five seconds for the child to comply, give a verbal reasoning for a time out, put the child in timeout while ignoring them, return them to timeout if they tried to escape, and then release them from timeout after the timeout period, plus three seconds of quiet at the end, and then the parent would immediately ask the child to do the original task again. The procedure was moderately successful in changing behavior, although compliance hovered around 60% after the Time Out procedure, which is far from total. The second study looked at 71 kids with ADHD, 44% of whom also met Oppositional Defiant Disorder criteria. These children were subjected to a time out procedure that was so complicated, there was a flow chart in the paper to describe it that involved reward points and timeouts that were extended for bad behavior, and could be cut in half for good behavior. Five children refused to go or stay in the timeout area and exhibited high rates of negative behavior during time outs. These children were rewarded for the time they were not in time out. For example, one child earned a nickel for every 15 minutes he was not in time out and. He could spend the money at the end of the day in a vending machine, although this is not an accepted part of timeouts, as parents are currently trained on them. The authors concluded that time out significantly suppressed the rate of problematic target behaviors for children with ADHD in the context of this intensive program. But the abstract fails to mention that they also had to add rewards for the children who resisted time out.

Jen Lumanlan 10:23
The citation for yelling and inappropriate vocalizations is a study of two children aged 12 and 14 with an IQ of 52 and 55 and if it’s been a while since you’ve worked with IQ scores, a score of 100 is considered, “normal,” and so an IQ in the 50s comes with significant challenges. In this study, a teaching assistant started distributing food rewards randomly in class, an observer in the class decided when a child had misbehaved and would covertly signal to this teaching assistant to put an orange card on the child’s desk and state name of the child you have misbehaved, you cannot receive treats for the next 10 minutes. Neither the teacher nor the student was ever told what behavior was incorrect. The Children’s vocalizations decreased by 55% and 53% respectively. Although it is not clear whether it was only problematic vocalizations that decreased or whether the children just stopped participating in class. Time Out is indeed an important component of three evidence based programs that Dr Knight describes, including parent child interaction therapy, which we’ll talk a bit more about in a bit. Dr knight goes on to state the different ages at which time out can be used. The study on infants was on four children aged 10 to 12 months, whose mothers were trained to start praising their children a lot and then give playpen time outs for what the researchers called Engaging in dangerous behavior, and this occurred between about a third and half of the observed intervals before the study began after treatment, this dangerous behavior only occurred in roughly 10% of observed intervals. This was not a short process, though, training sessions were conducted every four days, lasting between two and two and a half months, except for one mother and infant pair, where the mother’s illness and work schedule resulted in training periods every 12 days over a period of 10 and a half months. And this is probably why time out is generally not recommended for children under the age of two. The study supporting using timeouts with toddlers and preschoolers is kind of an odd one, because it focuses on a rarely used form of timeout called deferred timeout. If the child refuses to stay in timeout, they’re told they owe timeout to the parent before the parent will help them again with a task or by playing with the child. The effectiveness of timeouts in school these children is supported by studies we’ve already discussed. While the assertion that timeout is effective for adolescents draws on a 1988 study of timeouts conducted in three psychiatric hospitals for children and adolescents, some sort of facility that courts had sent children to, and a day treatment program. So as we return to Melissa’s question on whether timeout is effective, we see that researchers who cite evidence in support of timeouts effectiveness often cite research that Canada doesn’t really relate to our children if our children are not in an institutional setting. As a side note here, having done a number of episodes now, such as the two episodes on the Wonder weeks, as well as the episode on why authoritative is not the best parenting style, where researchers deliberately select white, middle class samples of normally developing children and parents with no known problems of their own, so the researchers can try to, as they put it, understand what actual development looks like before studying problematic populations. It’s really interesting to see the timeout research taking a very different approach much of the time. Art research focuses on the most difficult cases, often consisting of case studies that only involve a very few subjects. It’s very rare to find a case study that describes any procedure as failing, because these tend not to get published. It’s well known that journals are more likely to publish significant findings than null findings. So it’s possible there are a litany of unsuccessful and unpublished cases out there leading us to an erroneous conclusion about timeouts effectiveness. The only unsuccessful one that I found was actually by our old friend, Dr Todd Risley. He worked with a six year old girl who had brain damage caused by meningitis with, “an overlay of emotional disturbance and autism. He used a combination of time outs, shouting at her, shaking her and giving her electric shocks to stop her from climbing furniture and engaging in artistic shaking behavior, which today we would call stimming. At no point in this study did anyone try to understand why she was climbing so much or facilitate it in a safe way, and despite all the abusive treatment that she received in the lab, the paper says that no aggressive behavior toward any person or object occurred in the laboratory.” Perhaps the real headline of this story should have been that this girl had more amazing emotion regulation skills. Than half of the population when risley’s actions should have earned him a punch in the face. The title of his paper was the effects and side effects of punishing the autistic behaviors of a deviant child. So the child was perceived as deviant first, despite all of her diagnoses that indicated potential reasons for her behavior. The earlier research used participants with cognitive defects, neurodevelopmental disabilities and or serious mental health diagnoses, especially those who were institutionalized. It seems that timeout was perceived as a less aversive alternative to corporal punishment, electric shock and drugging patients in these settings that was commonly practiced. Much of the research on time out that includes larger sample sizes than five children, is conducted within Head Start programs, which are preschool programs that serve children from low income families. In one study from the 1980s 83 children in a Head Start program were seen by a dentist he wanted to know whether timeout would be an effective way of inducing compliance in the dental office if the child engaged in disruptive behavior during the appointment, the first incident was handled with a brief request for cooperation, and after the second instance, the dentist sent the child to a three minute time out up to three times, the child is removed from the dental chair, placed in a small chair Facing the corner until he, “calmed down, quit crying and was ready to help.” 12 of the 83 children required time out, which was successful in inducing seven of the children to continue with the exam. The other five required additional techniques, and two of these required restraints. Rather smugly, the authors note that, “regardless of the method used, treatment was completed on all 83 children.” So what do these children learn here? I’m thinking of Dr Larry Nassar, the former US Olympic gymnastics team doctor. And I would argue that it isn’t a massive stretch to go from a dentist who forces tools in your mouth without your consent, potentially while you’re restrained, to a sports team doctor who puts his fingers into your vagina, telling you that it’s a normal pressure point, therapy for pain relief, each one involves a figure of authority in a white coat, telling you that they know what’s best for you. If you learn when you’re in preschool that the white coat is going to do what they want to do, with your consent or without it, are you going to be more or less likely to question what authority figures in white coats do to you in the future.

Jen Lumanlan 17:26
As part of understanding the effectiveness of time out, I knew I had to read a book called time out in Child Behavior Management, because it was published in 2023 and I knew it would have an up to date assessment of the research on time out. One of the co authors is Dr Cheryl McNeil, who has worked extensively with parent child interaction therapy or PCIT, which incorporates time out. So I knew I was getting a pro time out perspective, but I was pleasantly surprised by some aspects of this book. It references a lot of studies and yet is written in a way that’s very easy to understand, which much of the time out literature, specifically and behaviorist literature more generally, is not normally in these kinds of books. If there’s any attempt to consider the research cited by the detractors of the approach being discussed, it’s done in a way that leaves me shaking my fists and mentally shouting. That’s not what the study said, but this book made a genuine effort to engage with the literature on what are called exclusively positive parenting methods, most of which was done by Dr Ross green on his method, collaborative and proactive solutions. Co authors, Dr linaman and McNeil conclude that while research on these programs is promising, “there is not yet enough empirical evidence to recommend exclusively positive parenting approaches, in the face of a vast literature supporting time out and behavioral parent training.” We also know that reasoning is not an effective way of getting child compliance, and this is generally seen as an important component of exclusively positive parenting approaches. But reasoning usually means that the parent convinces the child of why it’s important that they comply with the parent’s demand. I don’t advocate for reasoning in this way either, because the researchers are correct. It doesn’t work when you don’t want to do something that someone else has asked you to do. Does it generally help to have them try to convince you of their reasons why you should do it? Of course, it doesn’t. We actually want them to listen to the reasons that we said no, and to work together to find a way that works for both of us. Our children want that too. Dr Leeman own master’s thesis was on whether PCIT can lead to increases in emotion regulation, and she concluded that it does, and in the time out in Child Behavior Management book, this study is cited in support of the idea that, Preschoolers and elementary age children have demonstrated improved development of emotion regulation and self control following limit setting with time out.” But while time out is an important component of PCIT, there are a lot of other components to it as well. Parents are trained to praise their children and avoid questions and commands. Because these are more likely to generate responses from children that parents don’t like, and then which ramp up the spiral of negative interaction. Parents learn how to be physically close and affectionate with their children, make more eye contact, use appropriate vocal and facial expressions, and so on, over something like 25 sessions with a practitioner, the program is so rigorous that two thirds to three quarters of families usually drop out of research studies on PCIT. So a secondary purpose of Dr linaman thesis was to try to see if offering rewards like cheap clothing items would reduce the attrition rate, which it didn’t. Parents are also trained on how to set timeouts effectively, yes, but that is only one of a very large array of elements in PCIT. When we read that sentence again, I’ll say it again, preschoolers and elementary age children have demonstrated improved development of emotion regulation and self control following limit setting with time out, we see that it’s very carefully constructed to imply that time out caused the increase in emotion regulation, when actually emotion regulation increased after participation in a program of which time out was one fairly small element. We could argue that it’s likely it was the positive interactions that generated the improvement and not the time out at all. In general, I would advocate for using the strategy that has hundreds of studies supporting it over several decades, rather than the relatively few studies that have looked at exclusively positive parenting methods. But what if the reason there are hundreds of studies is because studies based on behaviorism are really easy to do. The things you’re trying to measure are so easy to find. You observe behavior at the start and at the end. If the behavior changes, which hundreds of studies have already said that it will, then you get a statistically significant result on a publication. If you’re a researcher whose application for tenure depends on successful publications of statistically significant results. Wouldn’t you want to do research related to behaviorism? Why would you want to investigate a new approach where the outcomes are more related to values and life satisfaction than the number of times per day my child is climbing a bookcase. So what if all of this research saying that time out is amazing is actually an artifact of the messed up academic tenure process, rather than because time out is really the best way to deal with misbehavior.

Jen Lumanlan 22:20
We also have to consider what actually happens when the child gets sent to time out. There’s a good deal of agreement in the literature on what constitutes an effective time out. And I’d guess this isn’t what the majority of parents are doing anyway, because there are quite a few elements to it and even more ways that you can fail to do it. Well, according to the experts, doctors linaman and McNeil outline this process very specifically, so I’ll give you their directions. I’ll also interject where they recommend procedures that aren’t supported by the literature, and where other major sources, like the CDC do things differently from them. Firstly, you have to make effective commands. These are commands that are specific and phrased in the positive, so put those books on the shelf rather than don’t make a mess or go and tidy your room. If the child complies, you are to provide specific praise, thank you for following directions. If the child doesn’t comply, within five seconds, you say, if you don’t put the books on the shelf, you’ll have to sit on the timeout chair, a phrase that they include, although there’s actually evidence that that does not add to timeout effectiveness, the child then has five more seconds to comply. If the child complies, you praise them. If they don’t comply, you say you didn’t do what I told you to do. So you have to sit on the Time Out chair, although there’s also evidence that the addition of the reason does not add to the effectiveness of time out either. Then you gently lift the child from behind with your arms clasped under their armpits and across the chest in a barrel. Hold you, remove any objects from their fingers and carry them to the chair. You step out of reach so the child can’t hit, kick or grab you and say, stay on the chair until I say you can get off. And then you go and do something else that looks enjoyable to the child within their sight. You’re supposed to watch the child without providing attention so kind of out of the corner of your eye without making eye contact. You time three minutes going by, and then you listen for five seconds of silence from the child. The Centers for Disease Control advises one minute of time out per year of the child’s life. But this is actually not supported by research. After three minutes plus five seconds, you approach the child outside the kicking zone and say you are sitting quietly in the chair, which is supposed to reinforce quiet behavior on the chair in the future. Then you ask, are you ready to and you insert the task that you had previously asked them to do. If the child agrees or makes an effort to comply, you go with them to make sure the task gets done. If the child says no or refuses. You restart the timer and say, stay on the chair until I say you can get off. Then you wait three minutes and five seconds and wait until the child replies and repeat as needed until they do the original instruction, which means the child can’t use time out to escape the original task. Once the child is done, you say a neutral comment like, Okay. Or Thank you. So the praise you give after the timeout doesn’t make the child want to do time out again. Then there’s one more step until the process is complete, where you immediately give a simple follow up command to establish compliance, or, as you might imagine, being on the receiving end, rub the child’s nose in it just a little bit more to make sure they know who’s boss. If the original command was come to the table, the follow up command could be Now, put your napkin on your lap. If the child complies within five seconds of the follow up command or after the chair warning timeout is over. If not, you go back into the timeout procedure. If the child gets up from the chair during timeout, you give a once in a lifetime warning. You got off the chair before I said you could, if you get off the chair again, you will go to the timeout room, then use the same barrel hold as before to move the child to their room and leave quickly closing the door and without pinching anybody’s fingers, holding it closed while being visible to the child, but not providing eye contact for one minute. I assume this means that unless you have a half door, you’re holding the door just cracked open. After one minute, listen for five seconds of silence from the child. When this is achieved, go into the room, pick up the child, return the child to the Time Out chair, step away and say, stay on the chair until I say you can get off. Once time out is over, you should try to re establish positive interactions and don’t issue any more directives for a few minutes, which is, “crucial for ensuring a child’s desire to please his or her caregiver. Doctors linaman and McNeil don’t say what happens if you’re ever in that once in a lifetime warning situation again, although you might remember from episode 148, on, is spanking a child really so bad that much of the research on spanking was done by Dr Mark Roberts at the University of Idaho in the 1980s the specific purpose of that research was on spanking as a backup when so called coercive children try to escape time out in a chair. Dr Roberts found both timeouts when shut in a room, and spanking functioned as effective backup methods that made the child stay in the chair next time. Although room timeouts were more difficult to administer, especially when you’re out and about and the child knows you don’t have a room to put them in. Dr Robert larsselear, who’s Dr Mark Roberts longtime collaborator, wrote that since the only type of room timeout that had been shown empirically effective is a four by five foot empty room with a four foot high plywood barrier to contain the child, but still allowed the child to see the parent. Dr laurgelio Then argues that clinics and families that lack this isolation room of precisely this arrangement, “need to retain the spanking option, or they would have to use alternative backups for time out that are either unproven or have been shown to be less effective.” And this specific paper was co authored with Dr Daena bohmride, and was the very same paper where they noted that, “undoubtedly, some parents can be authoritative without using spanking, but we have no evidence that all, or even most parents can achieve authoritative parenting without an occasional spank.” That was the phrase that launched my research that became episode 154 authoritative isn’t the best parenting style. In a paper published in 2024 Dr. Larsaliere and his co authors point out that researchers opposition to spanking has hampered our ability to conduct randomized, controlled trials to compare backup spanking with room isolation, and says that, “this may help explain why clinical treatments for child conduct problems are only half as effective now as when backup spanking was prescribed”

Jen Lumanlan 28:36
That is a lot. The procedure sounds relatively simple when you kind of spell it out all in order, but if you imagine your child screaming at you and trying to hit you throughout the whole thing, and maybe with other children screaming and doing their thing throughout the whole thing, it doesn’t seem nearly as simple, especially if you’re supposed to end up in a four foot by five foot plywood room or with a spank, the show Super Nanny was mentioned in one research paper related to time outs and spanking. I’ve never watched it, so I googled it and picked a random episode which featured a couple from Florida who had watched the show Supernanny, and were trying to implement timeouts based on what they’d seen. Despite watching the supernanny’s explicit instructions on how to administer your time out, the Supernanny was shocked to see the parents implementation of the idea as they repeatedly went back to the child while the child was in time out to issue more commands to the child. As they released the child from time out, they would hug the child and say, I love you, which the instructions say, could then entice the child to want to go into time out, because it’s parental attention and therefore a reinforcer, but the child would just be physically so wooden and have this haunting vacant look in their eyes. It almost seemed like the parent was saying, I love you to reassure themselves that they were doing this thing that the child hated for some reason that was important. You might also have noticed the lack of consideration in the language the parent uses toward the child in these. Studies, it’s pretty typical for researchers to tell a parent to instruct the child by saying, do X, no, please, no, when you’re done with what you’re doing, no, are you done with what you’re doing? And certainly never would you be willing to sometimes the parents would issue 30 commands, one right after another. Do this, do that, do this, do that. If you don’t do this, you’ll be in time out. Do that, if you don’t do that, you’ll be in time out. If the children in these studies ever spoke to the parents in the way in which the parents are instructed to speak to the children, the children would get sent to time out. But none of the adults involved see any problem with talking to children like this. The research lacks what is called ecological validity, meaning we can see a change happen in the lab, but if parents ever tried to use timeouts in this way in the real world, they’d get in trouble fast. Issuing that many commands to anyone doesn’t make them want to collaborate with you, and this is why PCIT focuses first on reducing the number of commands parents give because then you’re reducing the number of opportunities your child has to resist you another paper lists the various problems parents may face as they implement time out. And there are a lot of these. They can generally be summed as the parent not understanding the timeout procedures, not implementing them correctly for various reasons, including not understanding how to implement each component of the skill and getting distracted due to other children the parents ADHD not knowing how to apply it in specific situations, and not being willing to apply it because you want to do things you find more rewarding than punishing your child or because you’re in a public place and it gets your child to calm down faster if you just give them what they want. There are a lot of ways that this can fail, and the research reports that pretty much every parent who has never explicitly been trained by clinicians on how to do time out effectively. Are doing it wrong? Another paper lists the various problems parents may face as they implement time out, and there are a lot of these. They can generally be summarized as the parent not understanding the time out procedures or not implementing them correctly for various reasons, including not understanding how to implement each component of the skill, getting distracted due to other children the parents ADHD, not knowing how to apply it in specific situations, and not being willing to apply it because you want to do things you find more rewarding than punishing your child, or because you’re in a public place and it gets your child to calm down faster if you just give them what they want. There are a lot of ways that this can fail, and the research reports that pretty much every parent who has never explicitly been trained by clinicians on how to do time out effectively is doing it wrong. Doctors, linaman and McNeil say that time out is not appropriate or effective for infants and toddlers, partly because these children may not fully understand parental commands, and partly because you can more easily motivate them to comply without using negative consequences. They argue that time out is effective for children between two and 10 years old because they’re easier to carry and move than older children. They can’t kick as hard, run as quickly, or cling to door frames as well as older children. Can they say that? “Caregivers provide physical affection, food, toys and other preferred tangibles, financial support, social interaction and attention and access to and involvement in preferred activities. In turn, caregivers of young children are the keepers of access to reinforcement in most contexts. Therefore, caregivers can strategically deliver and withhold reinforcement to motivate desirable behavior from their children. Additionally, the caregiver child bond is typically the most significant relationship in the young children’s lives.” And as I read this quote, I was reminded of Episode 213 on how to stop using power over your child and still get things done. That’s the episode where I interviewed Dr Ari Parsi about her transition from using a power over model to one where she shares power with her children. Dr Parsi was born in Iran and grew up in the US, and in this clip, she shares how her thinking on compliance shifted during the time we’ve worked together. We’ve

Dr. Houri Parsi 33:59
talked about how you you don’t you can reconcile the model, I think, to fit you know your own family needs, if you can identify what the values are. And I would just challenge every parent to first see if they can identify how much is compliance your definition of a good kid. How much does it matter to you? And then, where does that come from? Is it really important to you to have authority and hierarchy and compliance, or could it be that collaboration and cooperation and respect and kindness and helpfulness and these other things can achieve some of the same goals and outcomes without needing the hierarchical authoritative compliance? And when you start reflecting on, well, is compliance really important to me? I think you have to look at where it came from. And for me, I remember very distinctly reading some of your emails about this, about the authority. And I remember feeling. Assistant like to it like, I don’t know that I can go all the way there, right? And so I was coming up with all the reasons why that’s a bad way to go. And then my internal dialog was like, Well, I’m the parent, just as if just the title or the role is enough, I’m more educated. I’m the older one. I pay for the house. I supply all the needs I you know, and so I’m that these things, the life experience and the education and the provision of the finances that these things should themselves, give me the power over their needs, should make my needs be more valuable than their needs. As I was hearing these thoughts, it sounded they were all the same things that they say in Iran and other very heavily patriarchal societies about reasons why the men should have dominion over their wives or the women the same. Usually, they’re older. They’re the ones providing the money. They’re the you know, and I could not, and I still cannot think of a reason of why the children should just do what they’re told by their parent because of their child and you’re the parent, or why the parent’s needs should supersede the child. I still can’t think of a reason that I don’t hear used as justification to oppress women. So for me personally, I had to come to the realization that I couldn’t be a feminist or believe in equality of the genders in the home and simultaneously demand that I should have authority or control over my children, versus a family culture where all the needs are equal and we work together collaboratively to meet all of our needs.

Jen Lumanlan 36:41
So is that why we’re using time out? Basically because we can, because our children aren’t big enough to fight back, because we provide the things that they want and need. To me, this sounds a lot like what Dr Parsi said about the reasons why men should have dominion over women, and so do we believe in that too, and if not, why are we using time out? The research on time out, along with a lot of other research on this kind of topic, takes a deficit and fear based approach. It says we can use time out to motivate children to behave in ways that are conducive to healthy development, which means not getting in trouble with parents and teachers, not getting suspended or expelled, getting good grades, going to a good college, not getting arrested, not engaging in substance abuse and so on. IT positions time out as the best available option compared with spanking and other forms of physical punishment, and basically says that if we don’t use time out when our children are young and misbehaving, that that will inevitably cascade into criminal activity and substance abuse later in life and potentially even in the teenage years. There is indeed evidence showing that children of parents who participate in a parenting intervention, which includes time out, show positive outcomes for periods up to three years later, although these samples were with children with diagnosably problematic behavior and significant parent risk factors, we might imagine that an improvement wouldn’t be that hard to make in this kind of circumstance, and that the parents simply being taught to be more consistent could be a big part of the benefit. If you’re going from parenting that the child finds confusing and frightening and that involves hitting to parenting that the child finds unfair and annoying, but consistent and less threatening, you’re probably going to see an improvement in child measures of attachment and well being. Research on college students recollections by Dr shinj at the University of Sydney found that parents effective use of time out was associated with less avoidant attachment, better mental health and emotion regulation over and above the effects associated with authoritative parenting and secure attachment in childhood, but the alternative parenting strategies that the researchers asked about were taking away a privilege, yelling, spanking and shaming. So of course, time out creates better outcomes than those alternatives. The College students generally endorsed time out as an effective and acceptable discipline strategy that had more positive impacts on their current well being than alternative discipline methods used in childhood, although I do wonder if they would still feel the same way after they had kids themselves, I don’t know that any of us are prepared for the way that becoming a parent rips US Open and makes us realize that all of the hurts from our childhoods that we thought we had a lid on And we’re coping with are still very much present and that we are not okay. So essentially, we’re fighting over which parenting style hurts our children the least by asking college students who have never had anyone try to understand and meet their needs, which of five crappy parenting methods they hated the least. That’s a pretty low bar, right? Shouldn’t we be aiming higher in our relationships with our children? Time Out is also not the only thing the parents learned in these interventions, but the research talking about the positive outcomes implies that it’s time out that’s the main factor creating this benefit when it’s highly unlikely that this is the case. Much of the research. On. Time Out is done with children whose behavior is so bad that their child their parents get referred to a clinic for help. We can see that time out as well as the more positive tools the parents are trained on create better outcomes compared to an environment where the parent is so frustrated with their child that they hit the child. But there’s no research saying that parents who already have a generally positive relationship with their child, can add time out and also see benefits in emotion regulation and compliance. In fact, I’d say it’s possible the child would perceive time out as much more negative. In this context, timeout also looks good to a child when it’s an alternative to being hit. Time Out doesn’t look nearly as good when the alternative is just that the parent tells the child not to do what they were doing, which the child gets to follow or ignore. The people advocating for the use of time out as a disciplinary strategy pretty much ignore this idea. I’m not saying that parents of children with really bad behavior should use time out, but everyone else shouldn’t. I’m just saying that this accounts for the benefits found in the research, while eliminating the idea that perhaps adding time out isn’t the best strategy for everyone else, this starts to edge us towards a question that Melissa didn’t ask, but which is addressed in the literature, and I want to take a look at it, which is, is there any evidence saying time out is harmful for kids? This is where Dr Dan Siegel comes into the picture, because he was involved in quite a kerfuffle a few years ago, basically, Time Magazine interviewed him and Dr Tina Payne Bryson on time outs as a promotion for their book No drama discipline. The article included the paragraph, “when the parental response is to isolate the child, an instinctual psychological need of the child goes unmet. In fact, brain imaging shows that the experience of relational pain like that caused by rejection looks very similar to the experience of physical pain in terms of brain activity.”

Jen Lumanlan 41:49
Time shifted that up a little bit to create their subtitle, which read in a brain scan. Relational pain that caused by isolation during punishment can look the same as physical abuse slapped a title on it of timeouts are hurting your child, and shipped it out to make the rounds on the internet. Dr Siegel and Bryson hastily published a Q and A blog post on Dr Siegel’s website where they clarified they had not intended to say that timeouts are equivalent to child abuse. Their second question is, do you believe that timeouts are hurting children? And the first sentence of the answer is, it all depends on what you mean by the term timeout. I would argue it also depends on what you mean by the term hurting. Doctors, Siegel and Bryson say that the appropriate use of time outs calls for brief, infrequent, previously explained breaks from an interaction used as part of a thought out parenting strategy that is followed by positive feedback and connection with a parent. In other words, if the parent is dysregulated, they aren’t supposed to put the child in time out, because there’s an increased possibility the interaction will end badly. The parent is supposed to not raise, raise their voice, escalate their emotion, or not use any other behavior that humiliates, embarrasses or threatens the child. The parent might physically harm the child as they move to the Time Out chair, the child might match the parents dysregulation and try to escape from time out, and now we have to either wrangle them to their backup timeout room once in a lifetime only, or spank them to get them to stay in the chair. In Dr Z’s study of college students, 82% reported experiencing time out in childhood, although adherence to evidence based parameters and implementation was widely varied. Only 23% of participants reported that their parents were calm when delivering time out. And while we can question the extent to which people completely accurately remember their childhood experiences, because parents are often frustrated by their child’s misbehavior, and because time out is used to deter misbehavior, it seems likely many parents are not in the ideal calm state when delivering the time out. Doctors, linaman and McNeil are adamant that there is no scientific evidence demonstrating behavioral or emotional symptoms of trauma related to time out, and I am not aware of any evidence either, but in all of the papers and books I’ve looked at on this topic, I have yet to see anyone explain why this is the case. If we know that we shouldn’t use time out when children are distressed because they’re activating the attachment system and looking for comfort, and we know that attachment relationships are crucial for children’s successful development, which the Time Out researchers say is important and give as a reason we should use time out, because we are an attachment figure, and so we do control the reinforcer of our attention and affection. And we know from the old still face experiment that the mother sitting right in front of an infant with a flat affect for just a few seconds is enough to create dysregulation in the child. How is it possible that forcing a child to sit in a chair or a room when they’re dysregulated while we refuse to provide them with comfort isn’t harmful in some way. More recent research has found that two and a half year old children who are more developmentally mature, “continue to react in dramatic ways to even a brief period of maternal unavailability, such as that afforded by. The still face, and that the still face continues to be a powerful and age appropriate stressor at this age.” Is it really possible that no harm is being done as the parent ignores their child and deliberately avoids making eye contact while they’re in time out? Is it possible that this harm is partly offset by the positive behavior training the parents in PCIT get along with the timeout training, or is it that our blunt survey instruments aren’t designed to capture the kind of harm that’s actually happening? The purpose actually, of Dr Knight’s paper that we looked at earlier was to investigate whether timeout causes harm to the children who experience it. They looked at children aged three years, in pre kindergarten, in the fifth grade, and found outcome variables that were similar, whether or not parents reported using time out, no differences were found with respect to internalizing problems like anxiety and depression, externalizing problems like aggression and rule breaking behavior or self control. But the absence of evidence of harm is not the same as the absence of harm. I asked the parents in my parenting membership what they remembered about their experiences of time out when they were young. Parent Claire said, “in the elementary years, I remember being sent to my room. I have no recollection of the behaviors. I’m guessing it related to conflict with my sister. I remember stewing in my room a lot. I feel this part still lives strong in me, feeling isolated and alone and that no one understood me or cared to and that I had to figure it all out by myself. I think I would eventually move on to a quiet activity by myself. I drew a lot, and I imagine this was useful in those times. I also really enjoyed spending time alone, and still do although as I got older, isolating myself definitely became a protective measure against shame, and it was hard to separate out when I was doing that versus when I was just liking the solitude. And of course, it only fueled the shame. As a teenager, I was grounded so frequently for smoking weed, drinking sneaking out. I actually enjoyed spending more time with my parents on those weekends, watching movies and being with them, without my sister, but then I would sneak out and party when they went to bed. It definitely didn’t stop the behavior. So while I was able to enjoy the time with them, there was also a massive wall between us, and I learned to hide so much of myself. This persists in our relationships today. Sometimes I literally feel blank, empty and have nothing to say around them, because those protective parts are so strong in their presence. Claire told me she was diagnosed with depression in her early teens, and she was clearly engaging in what researchers would call externalizing behavior as well with her friends. We can see grounding as the teenage form of time out, recognizing that friends at that point have become the primary reinforcer and removing that instead of parental attention, in this case, it was highly ineffective, because Claire actually liked spending time with her parents, and it didn’t stop her from doing the things she wanted to do. Anyway, she went on to say, I think I was always really sensitive, but learned to shut it down so I could feel safe and accepted in my family. I was so incredibly numb, hardened and pained. I think many of my high school friends were similar, and we found belonging with each other, drugs and alcohol was something to look forward to, a distraction from the emptiness and self hatred, and they made seeking connection and being vulnerable both feel doable and acceptable when we’re in the middle of it and we’re only seeing the parents perspective, we can see how they would have thought that time outs and grounding would communicate that her behavior was unacceptable, but if we see it from Claire’s perspective, we see this behavior as a desperate cry for help, and that more separation and disapproval is the last thing that she needs. I haven’t seen any time out researchers using survey instruments to measure the shame that Claire felt and the isolation that she still feels when she’s around her parents. Time Out certainly did not cause all of her difficulties, but they also didn’t make it any easier for her to connect with her parents and get help from them, and they exist within a system of parenting that doesn’t prioritize connection between children and parents. Parent Layla says she vividly remembers being put in time out with her nose in a corner one time. Her aunt had both she and her younger sister with their noses in a corner, and they weren’t allowed to come out until one of them apologized to the other. Layla said, shame, resentment, resistance and determination kept me in that corner until my younger sister finally caved and offered the first apology. I don’t even remember what it was, some silly sibling bickering that got us in the corner in the first place. I just remember hating that. It felt so arbitrary, intrusive and forced.

Jen Lumanlan 49:29
Layla learned to follow the rules, toe the line, read the room and bury her own needs. She now has two bachelor’s degrees, and as far as I know, she’s never been in jail, but she says I’ve had to relearn listening to my own needs and wants, re learn how to advocate for myself. I bristle when someone corrects or criticizes me, instead of letting me make my own mistakes and learn and experiment. I’ve also struggled with conflict aversion and finding value for myself outside of others perception of how good I am. Once again, time out alone did not create. Situation, but a home environment in which time out was perceived as a useful and appropriate parenting tool created it in Claire and Layla, we see two ways that I often see the disconnection that arises from using these kinds of parenting styles play out. Either the child rebels when they’re young by getting in trouble because they’re seeking the belonging they can’t find a home among friends instead, or they act like good children, so we think we’ve done a good job, but inside, they have no idea who they are, because they’re so used to ignoring their needs to please us. The American Academy of Pediatrics and the US Centers for Disease Control both recommend the use of time out, apparently based on evidence of negative outcomes associated with physical discipline and the strong empirical support of time out, perhaps this accounts for the apparent lack of harm among children whose parents use time out. When I watched the Supernanny episode, it was clear the parents were practicing time out in a very inconsistent way. Sometimes dad wouldn’t do anything at all, while mom would be screaming at her kid to stop screaming at her, since we know that consistency tends to be supportive for many children, it’s possible that a simply delivered three minute timeout is relatively less damaging for a child than the seemingly random lottery of effects depending on how the parent feels at that particular moment. Parent, Akiko, in the parenting membership community, told me that she was a pretty obedient child, but she remembers being locked out of their apartment several times during her childhood. She was also spanked occasionally, and her mom said things that Akiko found critical, which created feelings of shame. Akiko believes that if she had known what she’d done wrong, she wouldn’t have done it again. But instead, she had the sense that her mom had lost control of herself, and her mom’s behavior felt felt very scary and out of proportion to whatever Akiko may have done or not done, there was never any follow up explanation of why her mom had lost it in a situation like this. We can imagine how a clearly delivered time out, where the child understands what happened and how to avoid a meltdown from their parent could be a clear improvement in the child’s experience all of the parents in the parenting membership that I’ve quoted in our episode today, have done well by conventional standards. Many of them are highly educated and have had interesting careers. From the behaviorist perspective, time out has been a success. Their behavior has complied with societal expectations. But inside, things are not always going so well, even if we don’t have tools that are used in clinical settings to measure their shame they’re feeling and that they struggle to advocate for themselves and they think that they aren’t good enough. All of that is irrelevant to a behaviorist. There’s just behavior and what happens in response to that behavior. That’s how we tend to view children’s experiences, but it isn’t how we view our own experiences. Another hypothesis I have is related to the complex interplay between social comparison and internalizing behaviors like depression and anxiety. Research on social media use shows that when people compare themselves with others, and particularly when they envy what they see on others social media feeds, they’re more likely to experience depression. I’ll acknowledge the directionality isn’t always clear. It is possible that people who experience depression are more likely to compare their experience to others, but what I’m wondering is whether children who see that their siblings get time out and so do their friends, and they figure this must just be what life is like, and because nobody else has it any better than they do, there’s some kind of protective function at work, I would hypothesize that, especially when a child who is put in time out a lot, who has a sibling who is better behaved and rarely or never experiences time out, that these social comparisons could highlight how unfair their treatment is, which could increase the probability of internalizing behavior like depression, very occasionally, the Time Out case studies on single children will mention that the participant child has siblings, but the researchers never make any attempt to understand the participant child’s role within the family and how this is affected by the dynamic the parents have with other siblings. It isn’t too hard to imagine a favored younger sibling who gains a great deal of power and connection with a parent by provoking the participant child and then acting like the victim of the participant child’s so called aggression, and the aggressive child gets referred to behavioral services. This definitely happens in schools as well. I see a lot of posts in online parenting communities from parents saying their child is being hit andor bullied by another child. And of course, we want that to stop happening. Another parent in the parenting membership recently shared that her son, whom I’ll call Oliver, had hit another child repeatedly. And of course, the fair parent felt terrible about that. She’s given me permission to share this anonymized story, but it turned out that the other children in the setting would routinely welcome Oliver to his forest school program in the morning by saying, everyone hates Oliver, or we’re never playing with you. And then, of course, the kids end up playing together. And during that play, Oliver would say three times that he didn’t want a certain thing to happen, and then he would hit Oliver’s behavior looks like the problem here. But what about the other children who were overriding his consent three times when we only focus on aggression as a thing to fix? It looks like Oliver is the one with the problem when actually, Oliver is doing so much. That’s right, he’s saying no three times. Frankly, if anyone override my daughter Karis consent three times, I would want her to hit them as well. Fortunately, Oliver’s teachers were receptive to shifting the group dynamic by discussing consent with the whole group, offering for Oliver to play closer to them so they could hear when he needed help, and encouraging him to shout for help if he was further away from them. But doesn’t it seem like the teachers missed an opportunity to use time out effectively? Wouldn’t that have been a better way to tell Oliver his behavior was unacceptable to a behaviorist? None of that context in terms of what the other children are doing, matters. All that matters is Oliver was hitting, and timeouts can get him to stop hitting, but I do not want to live in a world where young boys learn it’s okay to override consent, because I’m pretty sure that’s not going to help us create a world where everyone’s needs are met. So that’s where we’re going to leave it for today. To summarize, timeout is an empirically backed parenting method that effectively changes children’s inappropriate behavior, and no research has shown that it harms children’s mental health, and that is why we can’t just read the research without doing our own analysis and looking at it through the lens of our values, because when we do that, we find that if our goal is to raise children who don’t carry a strong sense of shame around with them, and who understand their own needs and can advocate for their needs, and who perceive themselves As good enough, then research backed time outs may not be the tool to help us get there. I’ll be back in the second part of our series on time out to ask whether it’s ever appropriate to use time out for misbehavior, even if we wouldn’t use it to respond to a child’s emotional distress, and whether timeout is ever a tool that should be part of a respectful parent’s toolbox. And if it isn’t, what are we supposed to do when our child misbehaves, especially in ways we’ve asked them not to do 3000 times, and we know we don’t want to spank them, and if we aren’t giving them time out, are we saying they should just get away with whatever they like? No, we are not. I will be back with the second part of this episode very soon to help you find a way to navigate whatever misbehavior your child is doing right now, without spanking and without timeout. If you want to find the myriad references that I consulted for this episode, you can do that by searching time out on the podcast page@yourparentingmojo.com

Kelly 57:39
Hi, I’m Kelly Peterson from Chicago, Illinois. I’m a Your Parenting Mojo fan, and I hope you enjoyed the show as much as I do. If you found this episode especially enlightening or useful, you can donate to help Jen produce more content like this and also save us both from those interminable mattress ads you hear on other podcasts. Then you can do that and also subscribe on the link that Jen just mentioned. Thanks for listening. You.