The trouble with time-out Overheard at a mother's group earlier
this week, "I keep putting my four year-old in time-out, but it
doesn't seem to work. Nothing changes!" One of the most popular
discipline methods parents employ is time-out. This typically
consists of responding to your child's challenging behaviour
with the direction that she should sit somewhere boring and free
of distractions for a set amount of time to ‘think’ about what
was wrong with her behaviour. After that period of time, your
child is meant to be remorseful, having learnt her lesson. And
while there are many fans of time-out, parenting researcher
Justin Coulson suggests that despite the fact that time-out may
get some short-term results, it doesn’t really teach children
how to correct their own behaviour. What is time-out? “Time-out
is really a politically-correct euphemism for something I'm more
inclined to call ‘forcible isolation’.” Coulson says. “In real
terms, time-out involves a person of higher power (the parent)
using that powe