Some of you may have noticed occasional comments from Sharon Silver, the Mommy Mentor. Sharon runs a parenting consultancy called ProActive Parenting that deals specifically with discipline of toddlers and preschoolers. Did your ears prick up yet? Mine did, because the toddler age is notoriously hard to discipline. Haim Ginott stuff works fabulously on 4-year-olds, 8-year-olds, 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds and your co-workers, but there isn't much in it that's concrete enough for a 16-month-old. The gap between baby and big kid is long, and I haven't found a lot of discipline techniques that aren't either punitive and focusing on control, or comforting but laissez faire.
So when I saw that Sharon concentrates specifically on that age group, I definitely wanted to look more at what she's doing. Her philosophy is that discipline is always better than punishment, and that parents need to be teaching their kids skills for living. She says, "Discipline expresses a parent's boundaries with the emotional volume turned down." She's been working on this age since her own boys (now adults) were that age, and has come up with some solid techniques.
She offered to write something for Ask Moxie, so I tossed her a reader question about timeouts. The question is from Rosemary:
Your post raises some really important
questions about timeout, and that’s great, even if other moms
don’t like that you raised the issue. Your parental intuition
told you that timeout wouldn’t work well for your child.
Listening to your intuition is always a good thing, even if the only
result is a deeper investigation into the topic. My post also
includes a response to spanking as a form of discipline. You said you
don’t spank, however there are others who do.
As a society we’ve learned a
great deal about preschool behavior since the days when we were being
raised.
We’ve learned that parents really
are a child’s first teacher. We’ve learned, that just
like adults, the way you speak to a child determines whether he
fights with you or listens to you. We’ve learned that a child’s
foundation, the core of who he is, is being built during early
childhood. A child learns whether or not her emotions are accepted or
punished. She learns whether self-control is managed for her, by
spanking or consistent punishment or she learns, by how her parent
deals with defiance, that ultimately, she needs to control herself.
Based on all that knowledge, plus the
love parents have for their child, I wonder why anyone would spank in
this day and age?
As your child’s first teacher
what lesson do you hope to send your child when you spank, even if
done lightly? Unfortunately by the time your child becomes a
preschooler he will have learned that the way to get what you want
from another person is to hit them. Is that what you intended to
teach?
Timeout for little people has some
issues as well, let me explain.
After 17 years of teaching parenting
and 29 years of raising kids, in my opinion, timeout for
preschoolers, no matter how long they sit, just doesn’t work
well for little people and here’s why.
Timeout was designed as a time…out
for both parent and child to take a short break so they can
get calmer and then come back together to resolve the situation.
That’s not the way timeout
is being used today. These days timeout is being used as the
“acceptable” way we punish our children, and there’s
a big difference between the two.
Parents usually begin using timeout
around 18-20 months because normal developmental defiance has begun
to appear. Every parent I’ve ever worked with started out
with the best intentions for using timeout. The parent starts out
being calm, gets down to eye level, says the right words, and is as
loving as possible on the way to timeout. Then as the child
approaches two or three the way a parent uses timeout begins to
change.
The parent’s best intentions then
squarely meet the child’s developmental stage and temperament
and a collision happens that goes something like this.
The child refuses to listen or
cooperate; he wants what he wants. Now’s the time to teach the
child about his behavior, but the screaming the child does causes the
parent’s brain to become confused. The confusion from the
crying, screaming or constant demanding stops the parent’s
ability to think clearly about what to do next. Not being able to
decide what to do next makes the parent frustrated or angry, and can
cause yelling to begin. The parent is unconsciously hoping that the
yelling will be the magic key that when inserted into timeout will
end this, sooner rather than later, so this can be done.
Unfortunately the yelling upsets the
preschooler, possibly to the point of hysteria. I don’t know
too many adults that enjoy being screamed at when they’re upset
either! The crying causes the preschooler to revert back to a younger
emotional place, just to survive the yelling.
You know that emotional place; it’s
what’s going on when you say to your preschooler “why are
you acting like a baby?” or “stop crying, you're acting
like a baby!”
In order to survive the yelling, the
preschooler shuts herself down and stops listening.
Ladies, you know this one well; we’ve
been accusing men of this for years!
Because the child has difficulty
processing her crying, your yelling and thinking at the
same time, a preschooler is forced to gain more of the information
about the situation from your body language and tone of voice than
from your words. And since she’s young and still relies on
immature reasoning, what has she learned? All that she has learned is
when I cry or don’t do as I’m told, I’m sent away
from you—to a place called timeout.
No real learning has occurred. The
child has no idea what she’s supposed to do instead. The child
was never allowed to try again so she could learn how to manage her
emotions and resolve it in a better way next time.
Then the behavior happens again and
she’s sent to timeout, again. Her behavior is stopped, for the
moment, but she still hasn’t learned how to manage this so it
doesn’t happen again, and this goes on day in and day out.
When you see it broken down this way
you understand how young a preschooler really is, and you begin to
wonder, does timeout work well for preschoolers, is there a
better way?
The answer lies in this statement;
sometimes the best way to get a child to do something is to
speak their language.
I believe that preschoolers need
corrections to be made at the preschool level. Don’t forget,
your preschooler has only been on the planet for a few years. Even
though he’s walking, talking, potty trained and maybe in
preschool, he isn’t as old as he looks, especially when it
comes to discipline and the ability to change behavior.
Why do I say this, because adults have
the ability to use reason and logical thinking; preschoolers haven’t
even developed the ability to use logic, and that doesn’t begin
until around age 7.
Does that mean you can’t use
timeout? No it doesn’t mean that at all. It just means that a
better way to use timeout would be to match the concept with a
preschooler’s developmental needs.
Just like our computers, I believe that
it’s time for “timeout” to get an upgrade!
Here are three things I think need to
be included in preschool timeouts.
1. The teaching a parent does needs to
be done at the preschool level. An emotional child learns best when
information is scaled down to just a few words and the words are
something the child can understand even through the tears, words like
sit down, no hitting, or use your words, versus that’s not
appropriate.
2. The amount of time a child sits in
timeout really can be much shorter than 1 minute per age. Having a
child sit in timeout for a shorter period of time takes advantage of
what I call “child time”, the true amount of time
your preschooler can pay attention and hear you when she’s
emotional.
3. The ability to “try again”
needs to be included with your discipline.
Saying to a child, “you need to
try again and show Mommy how you wait for a cookie instead of
grabbing one from sister”, needs to be included so a child can
learn what you expect them to do instead of what they did.
Deciding how you’re going to
correct your child can seem over whelming at times, especially if you
and your husband have different points of view or if you feel forced
to use something that just doesn’t feel right.
Reading this gave me a big a-ha moment about the need to give the child the chance to correct his/her behavior. That turns the whole situation into a "do over" instead of a big crying scene that just makes everyone feel like a wounded jerk.
Now you guys know who she is, so when you see her comments here you'll know she's one of us, just a generation ago!
Comments on timeouts, or the difficulties of dealing with the toddler and preschooler years?
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