The scene is fairly predictable. Parents just winding up their busy day are trying to juggle housework, homework, baths, and bedtime when the kids start fighting. At first you try to ignore it, hoping it will just go away. But as their volume rises so does yours until you finally have had enough and send the child(ren) to TIME OUT!
While TIME OUT is a common means for managing misbehavior of all sorts, I’ve often wondered about the overall effectiveness of this strategy. Don’t get me wrong, I think TIME OUT has its good points. TIME OUT can stop a situation from further escalation, it can provide you with a few moments of relative quiet, and it can give the kids an opportunity to plot new ways to annoy one another (and you). However, simply removing the child from the situation to “think about” what they’ve done is not enough. I suggest that parents who assign their child to TIME OUT should at the same time assign themselves to TIME IN.
What is TIME IN you ask? There are at least three TIME INs for parents. When your child is misbehaving you need to take the time to INstruct them. Simply sending them to the naughty chair does nothing to teach them how to resolve a conflict or make a better behavioral choice next time. As parents we must make the time to clearly and concisely tell them what we expect of them. Note this is not the time for a lecture or begging and pleading on your part. Clear communication about expectations and consequences is essential, as is consistent follow-through.
Another TIME IN for parents is time to INvolve yourself by assisting your child with appropriate behaviors. If a child has trouble cleaning up a mess or completing a chore, sometimes it is necessary for us to get involved, teaching them step by step how to manage the task and seeing to it that is it completed. The obvious goal being that the child will require less and less of our involvement as they master tasks and take on more responsibility.
A third TIME IN for parents is time to INconvenience yourself. If there is one thing I’ve learned while raising five children it is that good parenting is definitely not convenient. I noticed that my children generally chose the most inconvenient times to act out, like in the middle of my grocery shopping, telephone conversation, or meal preparation. The big temptation is to ignore the behavior and hope that it will go away. But good parenting demands that we make the time, and take the energy, to deal with the problem. So it may mean that the grocery shopping is abandoned, the phone conversation put on hold, or you order in pizza while you take the time to deal with the misbehaviors.
When we make the time to effectively deal with specific misbehaviors, the children require fewer interventions on the parent’s part. The key is that it takes time to train our children and all of us are chronically strapped for time. It often becomes easier to simply nag, threaten, or scream rather than make the time to INstruct our child, INvolve ourselves, or INconvenience ourselves.
