The Problem with Time-Outs and the Naughty Step
OK, full disclosure; we have a Naughty Step in our house and, up until yesterday, I sometimes used it – not very often, admittedly, as I tend to use other methods, but it was in my armoury of discipline techniques and, if I’m honest, the trump card I would pull out when I got really cross.
But there’s a problem with time-out and the naughty-step and I’ll tell you what it is: Time out deals with one very specific issue and for ALL other issues it’s absolutely pointless. Not only is it pointless, it also kills communication and is, on balance, a pretty negative tool to rely on.
I’ll tell you a story. Yesterday my daughter pulled a newly hung shelf off the wall. The shelves weren’t expensive, just a cheap IKEA one with a few prints on them, but my husband had had a right old job getting them up, wrangling with the wrong sized rawl plugs and various things I don’t understand. When we put up the shelf, which hangs above the sofa, we told our daughter that she wasn’t to touch them, lean on them, grab onto them or anything, and we also told her for the gazillionth time that she shouldn’t jump about on the sofa.
Anyway, yesterday morning she pulled it off. Neither my husband nor I were in the room to see the incident. My daughter mentioned something about the cushion somehow breaking the shelf – an impossibility which I pointed out to her – until we reached the conclusion that she had been running along the length of the sofa, tripped, put out a hand to steady her fall and grabbed the shelf. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Rewind to the moment when my husband walked in to find her looking worried, and a shelf off the wall. We presumed she’d yanked it off deliberately.
I was cross. I shouted at her. I sent her to the naughty step, where she sat and cried. I watched her and I felt horrible, like the meanest mummy in the world. And while she sat there, I started thinking forensically about what we, as parents who use naughty steps, actually hope to achieve from enforcing it.
Consequence maybe? To teach a lesson? To prevent that behaviour from happening again?
I can only answer for me, and in that moment the naughty step served two purposes: 1. To give us both space – I was angry and I didn’t want to yell at her any more, and to make sure that happened we needed to be apart from one another. 2. To impress upon her that what she had done (at this moment I thought she had just deliberately pulled the shelf off the wall) should never happen again. By sending her a clear signal – shouting and punishing, I was hopeful she’d avoid that consequence in future by never doing that again.
But that’s wrong.
I’ve told my daughter time and time again not to muck about on the sofa. She still mucks about on the sofa. Why? Because despite what I say, she is four and she cannot manage and control her impulses. She just hasn’t learnt to, in the same way as she hasn’t yet learnt to read, and I wouldn’t sit her down with Wuthering Heights and expect her to read it aloud, so why would I expect her to control her impulses if that’s beyond her? And do I have a right to punish her for not doing something she hasn’t yet learnt to do?
By sending her to the naughty step I hurt her feelings, I isolated her and left her to deal with the emotions and feelings she was going through completely alone. I felt guilty. She felt hurt and angry.
You see, the idea of the naughty step or time out is only ever effective in a very specific set of circumstances. Be warned, I’m about to get technical; take a breath. When the behaviour being presented is done so in order to receive attention, removing attention is an effective intervention for dealing with and preventing that behaviour. By providing a response to an attention-seeking behaviour, a parent or carer reinforces that behaviour and increases the likelihood that the behaviour will be repeated again. The removal of the reinforcer – in this case, attention – means that the behaviour cannot be reinforced. Placing a child in time-out or on the naughty step means the attention the child seeks is not being given. The theory is that the attention seeking behaviour is then reduced.
Quite honestly, using this method of behaviour intervention for this very specific type of behaviour (and you really have to know the function of the behaviour very clearly) can be extremely effective. And it’s because of this and the big difference it can make to problematic attention-seeking behaviours (hitting and biting, for instance) that it’s had a lot of coverage and exposure in magazines and programmes such as Super Nanny. As such, it’s become fairly mainstream for parents, carers and even teachers in a school environment to use this method of discipline. It’s perceived as being effective, has gained traction and has become espoused by parents and carers the world over. The trouble is, it’s only EVER going to be effective as a behaviour intervention under an extremely narrow range of circumstances. And yet, plenty of us have adopted the idea of ‘off you go to the naughty step’ without truly understanding why we’re doing it, only that other parents do it, and so does that woman off the telly, so it must work, right?
So, back to what happened yesterday in my house. There was my daughter, sitting on the naughty step feeling horrible, and me watching her feeling equally horrible about what I’d done. My lightbulb moment went a bit like this:
If Time-Out doesn’t work (for all the reasons listed above), could a Time-In work instead?
What do I mean by Time-In? I mean dealing with the issue head on without shouting or punishing, creating a space to deal with that issue together, communicating, supporting, offering alternatives and creating an environment where everyone can effectively move on.
Yesterday, after I’d felt horrible about seeing my little bean all alone on her naughty step, I took her into the living room and we all, as a family, had a discussion about what had happened. We, the parents, listened to her version of the story, acknowledged it and then talked about how we felt about what had happened. Daddy felt sad because he had spent a long time putting up the shelf. Mummy felt sad because she had said not to touch the shelf and now it was ruined. My daughter talked about how she felt. At that point, having digested the various viewpoints, she understood the situation. It was less about being in trouble for doing something she perceived as ‘wrong’ and more about understanding the consequence of what she had done. She dissolved into tears and spontaneously offered an apology – one which was genuine. I was able to comfort and reassure her. I was able to offer an alternative activity suggestion to running about on the sofa, and we were able to move on.
You can, of course, go a step further with Time-In and, in the same way as the naughty step, create a space, a corner of a room, where you can go with your child to ‘sort out’ a behaviour issue. It should be a comfortable calm down space where you can sit and discuss what has happened. We have a corner already set up in my home with some fairy lights and cushions –it just needs a couple of cuddly toys, some gentle activities laid out, and this becomes not only a space we can share together, but a place where my daughter can go if she needs some calm time.
Importantly, time-in is about your child feeling supported as opposed to feeling isolated. It’s about your child being able to communicate with you as opposed to being left to suppress their feelings and deal with them alone for the duration of time-out.
The one snag in all of this is that you, as the parent or carer, need to be able to manage your own emotions at the outset; something I failed at yesterday when I shouted at my child. When you walk into a room and you find crayon over the walls, your best vase smashed to pieces or your IKEA shelf hanging off the wall, it’s key that you’re able to use your own strategies to quell the anger that threatens to bubble up to the surface. Unless you can do that you’re inadvertently taking out your anger on your child rather than dealing with the issue that got you to that point in the first place.
