‘Timeout’ Isn’t Always A Quick Fix

A psychologist recently wrote a letter to the Savannah News-Press in which he argued that sending a child to his room for an entire day, as I recommended in a recent column, is overkill. A few minutes of “timeout,” Fay asserts, would accomplish just as much, if not more.

The article in question pertained to a 5-year-old boy who had a history of “wild” temper tantrums during which he would often hit his sisters, ages 7 and 2. I recommended a “three strikes and you’re out” procedure: For the first two tantrums of the day, the parents were to send the boy to his room until he calmed down. For the third tantrum, they were to confine him to his room for the remainder of the day and put him to bed one hour early.

For hitting, however, he should be immediately confined to his room for the remainder of the day, even if the hit occurs during the first tantrum of the day. I also said that I had no problem, when he hit a sibling, with the parents spanking him and then sending him to his room.

I knew that my heresy would provoke complaint from other professionals, so the letter came as no surprise. Psychologists have been promoting timeout as the be-all, end-all of discipline for going on 25 years. And they persist, in the face of mounting anecdotal evidence that timeout works with children who are fairly well-behaved to begin with, but does not work nearly as well with children whose behavior problems are pronounced and/or chronic.

The letter-writer advises that timeout will work if it is used consistently. The problem is, one cannot use timeout consistently. It is difficult, if not impossible, to use if a behavior problem occurs away from home or when the parents are rushing out of the house to make an appointment. And children who are inclined toward misbehavior figure these things out quickly.

Furthermore, timeout doesn’t speak loudly enough when the problem is outrageous. A 5-year-old ignores a parental instruction? Sure, put him in timeout for five minutes. But when that same child hits a family member, I think a more memorable response is called for, one that “nips” the offense “in the bud,” as my parents would have put it. There’s something absurd about making a child sit in a chair for a few minutes after he has attacked a family member.

Many psychologists hold to the “party line,” which is that the disciplinary methods employed by previous generations of parents were excessive, if not abusive. I, on the other hand, hold to the heretical position that children of previous generations were more well-behaved than are today’s children because their parents used more effective means of discipline, as in sending children to their rooms for entire days and (gasp!) spanking.

Not surprisingly, some psychologists have a dim view of spanking. Spankings, they say, do not change behavior. Furthermore, they can cause children to become aggressive. The fact is, the research suggests that a mild-to-moderate spanking (two or three swats with the hand to the child’s buttocks) actually enhances such things as timeout and sending a child to his room for the day. So, whereas mental health professionals have for more than two decades been promoting timeout as an alternative to spanking, it actually looks as if spankings can turn a sometimes insubstantial form of discipline into a more effective one.

And there is nothing but rhetoric to support the notion that occasional spankings cause children to become aggressive. Indeed, some parents do spank entirely too much, but the problem there is not spankings, it is some parents.

The proof is always found in the pudding. Several weeks after writing the column in question, the parents who had posed the problem called to say that sending their son to his room, along with an occasional swat or two to his rear end, had put an end to his hitting, and had all but eliminated his tantrums altogether. I told them that when they felt they were completely “out of the woods” concerning their son’s behavior, they could fall back on timeout. . But first things first.

MEMO: John Rosemond is a family psychologist in North Carolina.

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