The Problem with Time Outs: Why They Fail, and What to Do Instead

Recently, in Part 1 of this two-part mini-series, we began looking at a question from listener Melissa:  "Can time-outs ever have a place in a respectful parenting approach?  (And if not, what else am I supposed to do when my kid looks me in the eye and does something he knows he’s not supposed to do?)"  That episode looked at the academic research on the effectiveness of time-outs, what else might account for the research that finds them ‘effective,’ and whether time-outs might harm children even if the research says they don’t. Today’s episode builds on Part 1 by exploring why time outs often fail to address misbehavior effectively - and may harm parent-child relationships. Key points include:

• We often don’t understand the distinction between misbehavior and emotional distress: Researchers agree that we should use time-outs when children misbehave, but not when they’re emotionally distressed.  But what if we aren’t as good at telling the difference between those two states as we think we are?
• Understanding why children do things we tell them not to do: We look specifically at what Melissa’s 3 ½-year-old son is doing - things like poking her face, throwing a toy when she’s told him not to, and dropping food on the floor during dinner, as well as pulling his sister’s hair, and hitting/kicking her.
• How alternatives to time out are even more effective: Even in controlled lab settings, compliance after time-outs often doesn’t exceed 60%.  We’ll meet parent Kendra, whose child had an Oppositional Defiant Disorder diagnosis that she no longer believes is true now she’s using the tools we discuss in this episode.

Drawing on research and these real-life stories, this episode offers actionable insights for parents who want effective alternatives to time-outs. Whether you’re dealing with boundary-testing toddlers or older children’s challenging behaviors, this episode provides tools to help you deal with your child’s misbehavior by creating empathy and trust, rather than disconnection and resentment.   Love what you’re learning? Support the show and help us keep delivering insightful episodes like this one! 👉  Click here: https://learn.yourparentingmojo.com/donate Ready to test your parenting instincts? Take our free quiz to see how these strategies could work for you!    Other episodes mentioned: Episode 227: Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 2 Episode 226: Where emotions come from (and why it matters) Part 1 Episode 213: How to stop using power over your child (and still get things done) Episode 207: How to not be a permissive parent   Jump to highlights: 01:52 Review of previous episode on timeouts 05:41 Understanding emotional distress and misbehavior 15:51 Addressing misbehavior without timeouts 19:30 The role of emotion regulation in parenting 36:02 Alternatives to timeouts   [accordion] [accordion-item title="Click here to read the full transcript"] 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. Parenting can be really hard, but it doesn't have to be this hard. If you've seen all the memes and quotes on Instagram and you know how you want to parent, but it all falls apart in the difficult moments. The Taming your triggers workshop will help. You'll learn why you have these big emotional reactions to your child's behavior, how to heal from the hurt that's causing it, and how to be with your child in a way that's aligned with your values, even when they're doing things that drive you up the wall. Enrollment for my 10-week Taming Your Triggers program opens on Sunday, February 9. If you've been thinking about this workshop, then now is the time, because you get all the amazing support you normally get for the turning-back-time price of just $147. 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...