So, The Washington Post has a piece up criticizing time outs

[conuly]

and offering, instead, "time ins" which remove the child from the situation without banishing them.

I don't particularly find this that interesting to discuss, but I am interested in the comments. All the critics - and there are plenty! - are convinced that sitting with your child and helping them calm down and refocus is bad because "then they'll just act out to get attention". They seem to take this fact on faith. Doesn't make much sense to me. If a child is really misbehaving for attention, surely the problem isn't that their parents pay too much attention when they misbehave, but that their parents don't pay nearly enough attention the rest of the time?

They also think that this means a. ponderously talking out and reasoning about everything every time your toddler hits somebody and b. that two year olds can never, ever, ever use any reasoning skills... even though they can calculatedly misbehave just to get hugs or something. They're wrong on both counts. Small children are surprisingly capable of understanding the logic behind "Hitting is mean, because it hurts others" and these talks don't have to be long and tedious. But honestly, mostly when a small child acts out it's because they're a. tired b. hungry c. teething or d. growing. Give them a cookie, shove some oragel on their gums, and put them to bed. You don't need to make a whole big punitive production out of everything. Usually children outgrow biting/hitting/screaming in their own time no matter what you do. So don't stress.

(Edit: And seriously, no serial killer ever got that way because Mommy and Daddy hugged them too much. Likewise, absolutely nobody in the world sits in their cheap nursing home, alone, thinking "I screwed this up. I should've hugged my kids less and hit them a lot more, and then they'd come visit me". I promise, you will never regret being kinder to your kids when they're kids.)

Comments

[asakiyume]

It's good to have lots of tools in your parenting tool kit, since their personalities and the situations they get in are diverse--and parents are diverse. No one technique is going to work for all people all the time, and what you get in comments are people remembering some time when their notion of the technique didn't work for them.

I do think **any** technique can be used stupidly or twisted or can cause damage--hell, even hugs and I-love-yous can hurt if they're they're used to manipulate or in a power display or transactionally. And contrariwise, almost anything can work if kids really feel in their bones that they're loved and safe.

[conuly]

what you get in comments are people remembering some time when their notion of the technique didn't work for them.

Most of them, I suspect, either have never seen anything like this and are reflexively against anything too nice or dislike how somebody they know is raising their kid (or how they think they're raising their kid) and blaming this even if it's utterly unrelated.

[asakiyume]

I confess I immediately thought back to an interaction in a park that I was a bystander for, back when I was a parent of small kids. It was, to my mind, a *terrible* application of time in. But there are lots of other occasions I can think of where people have used it well.