Parenting Class: Week 10 & 11

Luckily, since I never got around to posting about week 10, we covered the same topic in further detail in week 11!

The topic was time out.

We discussed it for two different purposes.  The first purpose was to teach them against aggression and/or violence.  The second was to teach them compliance to your commands.  (Remember we'd learned about commands a few weeks ago.)

Their recommendation is an immediate time out for any violence.  I.E. Hitting, biting, kicking, throwing something at someone, well, you get the idea. 

Their other recommendation is that if your child doesn't comply with your command, to give them a warning, then send them to time out.  However, the key in this piece is that once the time out is over, they have to go back to complete the command you had requested.  You continue the cycle until the command is completed.  If they don't do what's asked, time out. 

The other key to time out is that it is in a boring place.  They should be removed from the situation and placed somewhere by themselves.  We have a foyer area where a couple rooms take off with a closet in it that our boys have a time out chair in. 

We follow the general guideline of one minute in time out per year of age, but we also learned today that they need to be in time out and calm for 2-3 minutes before being removed from time out.  The theory behind this is that if they're not calmed down when they're done with time out, they'll go back to the misbehavior that landed them in time out to begin with.

Time out is a method to teach the child to calm themselves down and to control their emotions.

We were also advised not to lecture after time out about why they spent time there.  It's best to just move on with activities.  We're directed to say "you hit, now you must go to time out."

We've been using time our for some time.  We're lucky that our boys have adjusted to it.  We did go through a phase where ever time you put Caden in time our, he'd pee his pants, but luckily the ignoring method we learned earlier worked, and that stopped too!