Please share your time out technique

msnehz

What item or location in your house do you use for the time out spot? Do you use a timer or any other tool? How many minutes? What are some behavior/incidents that made you use time out with your LO? How do you implement time out when your not at home (some one else's home or out in public).

ldcoffel

My time out spot is the landing of our stairs. She sits in timeout 1 minute= 1 years, so 3 minutes. I do it when she delibertly does something wrong. Hitting and kicking DS are mostly what she earns it for. I don't usually use timer, because I'm usually comforting the baby.

If I am somewhere else, which I only had to do when she was around 2, I would find a place out of the way. I remember being at a store and made her sit next to a pillar for 2 minutes.

bearkatjen

We follow 1-2-3 Magic: https://www.amazon.com/1-2-3-Magic-Effective-Discipline-Children/dp/0963386190

As long as DH and I are consistent, it works really really well. We use DS's room for timeouts. DH and I are in a little disagreement on how long time outs are. We both agree time outs should be DS's age plus one minute, so 4 minutes right now, but I think the timer should start as soon as DS goes to timeout, and DH thinks the timer should not start till DS stops his tantrum.

We don't have a good system in place for when we are not at home.

mrsschwags

Our timeout spot is in our front hallway.  There is nothing that she can get to if she's in that spot (it's an empty area).  We do it for each minute of her age.  She turned 3 yesterday so with that comes the added minute to her timeout too. 

Any time that she hurts someone (hitting, when she used to bite, etc...) we would put her in timeout.  If she would throw food on the floor at dinner and we would ask her to stop and she didn't, we would give her three counts and then remove her from the situation for a timeout.  She would always want to come back and finish dinner without throwing food after that.

When we are away we find an area that is out of the way.  E.g. we were at a fair and she tried running away from us several times.  We gave her three counts and she still didn't listen.  I found a tree on the side of the walking area and sat her by the tree and counted to 120 in my head (she was 2 at the time) since I didn't have a watch.  Another time we were at a store and she kept grabbing clothing from the rack and throwing them on the floor.  I asked her to stop three times and she did not listen.  I pulled the cart to the side of the aisle and put her in the cart and had her sit in a timeout in the cart.

A book I read said it doesn't matter where you do the timeout (even if it's the car) if they know it's a timeout and you make them sit for that period of time, it will work.  Timeouts are very affective in our house.  They are a great way to redirect negative actions and seem to work almost every time.  We also try not to do them often.  If DD was in timeout 10 times a day every day, I would think we would need to do something different.  We also try to use positive reinforcement whenever possible.

Good luck!

Torani

We do timeouts in any available chair, usually in the next room. If we are all in the family room,he sits in a chair in the living room. We do one minute per year old, and I add 30 seconds if he does not apologize. He mostly gets timeouts for hitting, and recently for talking back (after a warning). Afterwards he has to apologize and hug/kiss whomever he hurt.