Egg Timers, Barbies and Chatterboxes

I want to tell you about the time my daughter taught me to really believe in doing time outs, the right way!

I don't remember why she was in time out.  It wasn't anything earth shattering.  All she had to do was sit in the chair and wait for the egg timer to ring.  I think she was four years old, so it would have been 4 minutes.  Instead it was a half an hour of her crying in her room. That is the point where I started to think those normal parent worries,  "It's not working? why hasn't she calmed down? am I exasperating her?, will it hurt her?"

Oh yes! The parenting "Chatterbox" was working overtime.  The chatterbox is the storehouse of  negative experiences and provides a stream of negative energy and thoughts that you generate when you are worried. (roughly borrowed from Susan Jeffers, "Feel the fear and do it anyway" http://www.susanjeffers.com/home/index.cfm, Random House Publishing, 2006 )  If you don't keep it in check it runs over every rational thought and takes over.

My chatterbox was in rare form that day.  But one rational thought sneaked through. "She really shouldn't be this upset over a time out"  So I sneaked up stairs and poked my head around the corner.  There she was, on her bed moaning like she was dying...while she played with her Barbies on the bed.  

Not everybody likes the idea of time outs!  Some people really react negatively if you talk about counting to 3. You can see why.  What usually happens is usually a diatribe in the middle of the counting.

                          "Billy, Stop that!" (Billy is a made up name for our purposes)

                           "Billy, I said stop it!" 

                           "Billy, Don't make me count you!" 

                            Fine, Billy that's One.

This is not what Thomas Phelan, {the author of "1, 2, 3, Magic"  (see him at   http://youtu.be/ihHl3oscy7Y,} had in mind.  "Too much talk" is one of the reasons time outs and counting don't work.  The other reason is too much emotion.   Both result in the parent owning the problem instead of the child.  Normal parental anxiety interferes with effective follow through.  If you are worried that the time outs will take too long, don't. With Phelan's method the time out is only 1 min per year (childs age)....from the time the child accepts the time out!  That's the part that is hard to get your head around.  Because kids can temper tantrum for an hour and occasionally will.  Trust me, I know!