Speaking of entering the 'terrible 2's'

nebraska84

My son, my sweet sweet boy has been throwing a lot of little fits lately, especially at meal time b/c he wants so badly to feed himself and he just can't always figure it out. So then he resorts to banging the silverware on the table. Anyway, we are seeing a lot of banging his toys on the wall, or cabinets or table just because. I am wondering how everyone handles timeouts in your household. Is it 1 warning, then a 1 minute time out? If they go right back to the behavior is it straight to another timeout? I don't feel like I am consistent enough with timeouts and probably give to many warnings. Just wondering how everyone else handles this...

suitern

It depends on what it is-hitting or biting (anything physical) gets an immediate time out. Throwing toys we don't do time out for we give three chances and he gets it taken away and an explanation why. For most things we give 3 strikes, then take a break philosophy.

Sept07b2b

I'm curious to see what others have to say about this.  We've started doing time-outs, and my DD HATES them!!!!!  Typically a threat of a time out works pretty well, but then a couple minutes later she'll go back to doing the objectionable behavior.  

For us it's a lot of yelling/screaming or standing up on furniture.  We would do what @suitern does for physical things (automatic time out), but otherwise, we try to do 3 strikes and then time out. Admittedly, she might get more like 4 strikes, since I really really really hate putting her in time out, so it's more like "if you don't stop that, you're going to get a time out," and then we count to 1, 2, 3.  1-2-3 magic worked really well with my DS, so we're trying to do the same with DD.  We just started earlier with DD, so it's been a bit tougher.  I don't think we employed 1-2-3 magic with DS until he was closer to 3 and by then he really understood what we were saying/doing.  DD still seems so young to me!