Is Kids Time Out Effective?
Wondering if kids time out really works? Here’s why I gave up time out and what I do instead—3 tips that will help when it’s time to discipline.
It’s one of my earliest memories. She took my toy and I didn’t like it, so I bit her. I mean, what would any self-respecting 4-year-old do? I had to defend my right to have that toy! Right?
OK, the truth is I don’t really remember how I felt. I actually don’t even remember why I bit the girl. I just remember one thing: the penalty. I remember the sting on my tongue and the bitter taste.
Yep, you guessed it. My teacher put soap on my tongue and stood me in the corner for an old-fashioned kids time out. She decided that if I was going to use my mouth to hurt someone, she would do something to keep my mouth from enjoying that activity. And it worked. I never bit anyone again, mostly because I didn’t EVER again want to experience the same pain and taste the soap left lingering.
Now, I’m not advocating that we all get a giant bottle of soap and start dousing disobedient children. Please don’t hear that. I bring up this story to illustrate my point: We don’t usually stop a behavior unless the consequences we face are logical, painful, and memorable. Take, for example, touching the stove. You’ve probably burned yourself on something at some point in your life. What keeps you from touching the stove? It’s mostly the fear of that painful and memorable consequence: getting burned.
So, based on that lesson, does putting kids in time out have an effective discipline result? I’d argue that it doesn’t. Here’s why.
Table of Contents
Why I gave up putting kids in time out
1. Putting kids in time out is neither painful nor memorable.
Please don’t panic. When I say “painful,” I don’t mean physically. In most cases, I want a consequence for my children that will cost them something. It is “painful” because they will lose something, like the privilege of riding his bike because he won’t put it away where it belongs. Some consequences are actually physically painful, like when you keep running on the sidewalk anyway and skin your knee. This is actually a natural consequence. That means it happens as a natural result of a poor choice.
As parents, we don’t give natural consequences to our children. (I’m trusting that you are not pushing your kids down on the sidewalk. Haha!) But the consequences we do give should be “painful” in the sense that the child actually wants to avoid the consequence.
I find that putting kids in time out costs them very little, maybe a little time away at most. And let me tell you a secret about that. MANY children actually enjoy a little time away from the situation. They need to be removed from it and don’t know how to do that themselves, so they act out. When we respond by giving them a time out, we are actually making them happy. That encourages the very behavior we are trying to stop. And, of course, it leaves them ill-equipped for handling problems when we aren’t right there to remove them from the situation.
2. Logical consequences are far more effective.
If putting kids in a time out chair isn’t teaching them anything, I need a better solution. I have no desire to tell them the same things over and over again. I want them to learn the lesson, and I bet you do too! Logical consequences are the answer to this. The concept is simple. Rather than just spewing out wrath and penalty for inappropriate behavior, take a few minutes to cool down (you can read more about that here). Then, come up with something that “fits the crime,” so to speak. Like I mentioned above, if my child leaves his bike out, he clearly hasn’t proven that he is responsible enough to ride it. So I take away that privilege for a period of time. For little guys, this might be one day. Older kids might lose it for one week.
This kind of consequence puts the responsibility back on the child. It costs them something, and it’s memorable. Now it might not work perfectly or right away, but think about it. What benefit would sitting a child in time out have for helping the child remember to put his bike away? There is no logical correlation to the child. I hate to leave you hanging without many examples here, but I do discuss this more in-depth in my post Creative Consequences for Kids. You’ll find lots of practical ideas there.
3. Time out does little for the heart condition.
I do want the behavior to change, but the thing that is easy to forget is our purpose in child training. Am I giving a consequence because I am just annoyed with them, or do I have a higher purpose here? For me, I’m not training my children to look good in front of others. I don’t want him to put that bike away simply because it makes my yard look neat. I’m more concerned that it might cause someone to trip and fall or it might rust out in the rain.
I’m training their hearts. I want them to choose to do right because it’s right. The kids time out chair does very little for this. It does offer a few minutes to think, and I have used it for that purpose, but then I need to take action on the real issue. If I want to get at their heart, my goal is to give more logical consequences, followed up with a good conversation about their choices. I usually will ask them 3 important questions that help lead them to the truth about their behavior.
If you’d like a little more guidance on teaching kids the importance of obedience, check out Obey. It’s my Bible study for kids that teaches the why and how behind obedience. The Obey Bible Study is part of our Relationships Series, designed to teach your kids Biblical principles for developing and strengthening Christian relationships.
Get more tips here— How to help kids obey
So what do you think? Are you ready to give up the kids time out?
MORE POSTS ABOUT OBEDIENCE
- Pointing a Rebellious Child to God
- 5 Tips for Your Disobedient Child
- Teaching Your Child the Importance of Obedience
- How to Get Your Kids to Stay in Bed
- How to Teach Your Kids to Stop Interrupting
- When Your Child Embarrasses You in Public
- How to Limit Screen Time and Get Your Kids to Obey
- 3 Christian Discipline Questions to Ask Your Kids
- How to Get Your Kids to Listen
Through practical tools & Bible-based resources, Kim Sorgius is dedicated to helping your family GROW in faith so you can be Not Consumed by life’s struggles. Author of popular kid’s devotional Bible studies and practical homeschooling tools, Kim has a master’s degree in education and curriculum design coupled with over 2 decades of experience working with kids and teens. Above all, her most treasured job is mother and homeschool teacher of four amazing kiddos.
Time out around here is to give us a chance to calm down and get control over our emotions before addressing behavior issues. I’ll send my boys to their beds to calm down while I go to my room to get calm and pray and look up a scripture or 2 before going into talk with them.
My biggest trouble with creative consequences, is that I can’t remember them after I have issued them. I have 6 kids. How do I remember that child A can’t play video games for the next month, child B can’t play in her room alone, child C can’t have sweets for a week, child D may not ride his bike. etc, and never mind if they have committed more than one “crime” recently.
It gets too complicated. I’m still in the old camp, the book of Proverbs works for me.
I can understand why you would feel this way. I don’t tend to give consequences for days. It’s actually rather rare. It’s usually things like, “for the rest of dinner” or for the rest of the day. Occasionally, I will remove technology privileges for days or even a week. I mark it in my calendar, so I know when they get it back. All of that said, Proverbs is a good book and I’m not at all opposed. 🙂
I mostly agree with you, but the hard thing about the way you’ve put it is that it’s not abundantly clear that you mean time-outs as the disciplinary action is not effective. Also, creative consequences work best for older children who already trained and no discipline is one-size fits all. I have a five year old, a three year old, a two year old, and a four month old. The five year old has been a long work in process and while we do try to lean towards creative consequences, he still requires a lot of discipline for being defiant or rude, as well as going out if control when he’s upset by the answer he receives or his consequence. So, since we’re still often training and he reacts so poorly to his consequences sometimes, time-outs are often necessary for him to calm down enough to listen.
For my three year old, time outs are very “painful” for her so they are pretty effective for training her. I try to do creative consequences as well for her because they are also effective, but most of her need for correction is based on defiance or causing fights and needing to be removed from play.
And for my two year old, who is aggressive and a rager, every other attempt at discipline sends him over the edge. So we have to put him in a car seat in timeout in his room for discipline because otherwise he can become so out of control he breaks things or hurts himself. He hates it, but because he hates it, the process only takes a minute and then he is willing to apologize and obey. And especially since he is often aggressive and hurting others (and no other discipline has deterred him), making it clear that he will be taken away from playing and can’t be with his friends if he hurts them seemed necessary. We’ve been doing it for about a week now and it’s the first time we’ve seen consistent improvement in obedience, fits, and aggression.
So, I appreciate and see where you’re coming from, but we ultimately have to seek wisdom from God to know each of our children individually and learn how we can effectively correct them each so we can then teach them to do what is right in his eyes.
The realty is that everyone has to do what is right for them and for their family. I am a special ed teacher with a strong background in behavioral management. I am an advocate for time outs for the right children. 1,2,3 magic with the time out in a slight variation is highly effective for my children. It is not used often and as you said that timeouts for your children were not painful, it is to mine. They do not like timeout, they sob, they are devastated. It is effective. But we do not use it frequently. Time outs used as a routine part of behavioral training is ineffective, it loses it’s purpose. So for us and I am sure for many others timeouts work. Natural consequences are great but they are not always realistic and they do not always happen when we need them to happen.
Hence the title: Why “I” gave up time out. 🙂
I agree that acting out needs to be followed with a memorable consequence so that children remember why they don’t want to do that again. It isn’t easy to come up with such consequences on the spot though I’m sure.
I think that, although you make some great points, that teaching a child involves so many different forms of guidance and discipline one could never list them all in one little blog article. I have used time out when the message was that if you behave that way, then no one will want to be around you. A taste of being alone works great when that is the message you want to give. I have used many other methods as well, and they are all based on a situation but situation circumstance. Having said that, I most certainly don’t want every lesson to be “memorable”. Big lessons, absolutely! But in day to day life I want my daughter’s memories to be of all the good stuff, not lessons, I want most lessons to just slowly seep in by observation. Day to day child rearing requires some very low impact discipline, and time out do fits in to the low impact category, as you are right, they aren’t “painful or memorable”. I really love your third point about training by the heart. This is the approach I have taken most of the time with my daughter. I can’t say that I have never timed my daughter out because I’m annoyed, or that I have never timed myself out because I am annoyed but I also can’t say that those time outs weren’t beneficial to both of us.
You say your end goal is to raise children who choose to do right because it is right. You also say that when your teacher put soap in your mouth for biting another child you never did that again because you did not want that punishment again. You did right out of a fear of punishment. Your teacher did not teach you another way to resolve the issue, manage your frustration or to have compassion on the child you bit.
Time out is not the issue. Neither is punishment. Or imposing the right consequences. They need us to teach them. What SHOULD they do? How do they fix it when they have made mistakes or hurt someone else? Kids don’t have the emotional maturity, experience or ability to see things from an adult perspective. Do they know better? Sometimes. Can they always make their behavior line up with what they know? No. And heck, I still do things I know I shouldn’t . Have you ever eaten food that is unhealthy? Stayed up to late? Said something you shouldn’t? I know I have. If they are out of control, they need help to get it back together before they can do any of these things. Feed a hungry kid, put the overtired one to bed, and help the one who is out of control get out of the situation and regroup. It is not making them happy by giving them what they want. It is helping them be successful by giving them what they need.
I agree with you. The element of teaching should outweigh any form of discipline, period. That wasn’t so much the topic of this post. I was suggesting that “time out” as a concept was not effective. Please feel free to read further if you’d like to understand my philosophy. Thanks!
I appreciate your post! I do think figuring out what “costs” the child will be most effective. I’ve had good luck so far with 1,2,3 Magic with timeouts but I do think for things like losing bike privileges for not putting the bike away — logical consequences are so effective! I do feel for the mom who has 4 children and I could see how logical consequences could be difficult to manage as well as how they effect other kids in the family too (as when maybe another sibling wants to ride with an older one but can’t). In the end, I feel my struggle is that disciplining children requires discipline on my part. It can be hard for me to leave a store, restaurant or not go somewhere just because my child can’t handle it. In the end, I appreciate your post because it encourages parents to think about how your child responses to discipline, and if it’s not working — change it up! You give some great practical examples on how to do that. Keep up the great posts!
In some, I think the heart of the matter isn’t time out vs. no time out but parents knowing what gets through to their children. I was getting ready to try soap with my 3-year-old but just telling her it was a possibly has helped shape up her attitude!
Everyone makes great points but where do you start then ? How do you approach it?? What are the steps. Especially when it comes to bed time an when you have a routine and follow with it always even on holidays ! . But never fails every night like clock work. After 7:00 whind down and a little screen time before to relax . 8-8:30 , 9:00 is the bedtime . Where in between thoes times she’s going to sleep and trying to fall asleep. We do many things to help falling asleep. Bath time @6 dinner is already at 5:30 -6:00 after bath time we calm down dim the lights and watch a little show before bed sometimes not all the time read a book an always during the day get in plenty of cuddle time. But at night she practically holds me lock ball an chain in the bed to co sleep with her the momment I move she’s up questioning where I’m going or to cuddle. She’s got night lights even 2 kitty’s to cuddle her at the foot of the bed. But still cries to be cuddle and won’t let me have any adult time at night time due to waking up every hour to 2 hours at night. I’ve done time out or taking things away with the understanding of why . At night time we can’t get up and cry for mom to stay in the bed all night. It’s seriously putting a strain on my relationship with my husband we’ve been kicked out of our room an sleep in the floor on a mattress in the living room . We’re completely finished at this point