I have a question, I want to see if anybody else has experience this

Several people today online have commented that they do time-outs with their under-5 children, and that the kid had any number of time-outs just this morning, and it "has to work eventually".

I've found that, while time-outs are useful in some circumstances (like when the kiddo has just stolen her sister's doll and pinched her, or when they've deliberately thrown all their food on the floor and refused to help clean it up and called you mean, that sort of thing), it is very, very, *very* easy to go overboard on them.

And once you do that, the behaviour doesn't get better, it just gets worse. The kid gets crankier and crankier and moodier and moodier and more and more high strung, prone to crying at little things. And they do more and more little things - things which, on their own, aren't that bad (and that the kid normally wouldn't do anyway), but which, in this bad day you're having, really start to add up - they say they aren't hungry, then whine that you didn't give them a snack, they stomp their foot and glare at you, they ask for their mom/dad/whoever a lot (and that gets old real fast), they do things as you're telling them not to do them, that sort of thing.

And it can take a whole day to snap the kid out of a morning of this moodiness. A day rapidly turns into two days, or more - especially if, unlike me, you have to deal with a sleepless kid.

I have found other ways of stopping minor misbehaviour (not major stuff, which is in a different category), and it doesn't solely consist of playing with them until they cheer themselves up (would that I could to that all the time, but I don't know that their parents would approve, nor that it'd always work)... but what I want to know is if anybody else has seen this happen when time-outs get used too much.

Somebody asked me about alternative methods to time-outs.

And I started this whole comment, and then decided to rewrite and make it a post.

That post isn't going too well, because my thoughts are all in a jumble, and I'm talking about 20 things at once.

So I'll post tomorrow or so, but right now leave you with one thought - prevention is always better than cure. Even if it looks that way, your kid's behaviour doesn't appear out of the ether. It always comes from somewhere, and the best alternative to a time-out is to help your kid behave well in the first place so a time-out isn't even necessary.

This can be a lot harder than it seems the way I said it, so I now need to do a two or three part post - ways to help your kid behave, ways to help a kid calm down or refocus once they've misbehaved already, and ways to help your sanity either way.