• Principle: Stay calm. Timeout means time away from your attention. Any attention, even negative attention, is a form of reward. So, the first principle of timeout (and all effective discipline) is to stay calm. If you lose your cool, you will be rewarding your child with very intense attention. Without meaning to, you will be increasing the likelihood that your child will repeat whatever negative behavior upset you, rather than decreasing it.



• Principle: Timeout is most effective when there is plenty of "time in"--that is, plenty of happy, enjoyable time together. Making positive time happen can take real effort when a child has developed a pattern of negative behavior. But the effort is very important. Without "time in," timeout becomes merely a version of business as usual. It loses its power.



• Principle: Minimize attention during timeout. Timeout is time without attention. One way to minimize attention from you is to use a kitchen timer that ticks and has a loud bell. Set it up where your child can see it, and let your child know that she has to sit in timeout until the bell rings. If she gets up ahead of time, the timer gets reset. The value of using a timer is that it takes you out of the equation. Pleading to you doesn't do any good, because the timer is in charge. For the same reason, avoid talking to your child during timeout or even looking at her very much. If possible, go about your business as if she weren't there. If she makes enough of a racket or gets up out of timeout so that you can't ignore her, make a point of resetting the timeout clock and telling her that the timeout starts once she is quiet.



• Principle: Make timeouts short (one minute per year of age). The whole point of timeout is to teach your child that a particular behavior is unacceptable. A short timeout--about a minute per year of age is a good rule of thumb--works as well as a long one. If the timeout is too long, the child forgets what it's about and it ceases to teach her anything. The only thing that happens is that she feels angry and resentful. On the other hand, the more often a timeout occurs, and the more consistently it follows an unacceptable behavior, the more the child learns from the timeout. So, by keeping timeouts short, you are able to fit more of them in, which teaches even more.
  
  Let me give you an example of this. Your three-year-old is running through the house, screaming at the top of her lungs. You tell her to stop, but she is just too full of energy to listen to you. Sending her outside to run and scream isn't an option, for whatever reason, so you decide your daughter needs a three-minute timeout. A couple of minutes after it's over, she's back to screaming. So you give her another timeout. Five minutes later, she's screaming again. So she gets her third timeout.
  
  The result of all this in and out of time-out is that you've given your daughter three opportunities to learn that screaming inside is not acceptable. If you'd given her a 15-minute timeout in the first place, she would have had only one opportunity to learn that particular lesson and after a few minutes, she might not even have remembered about the behavior that got her there in the first place.
  
  It's important that when the timeout is over, it's over. Instead of reminding your child again and again about the negative things she did, focus instead on the positive, pleasant things ahead. Not "I'm glad you've finally stopped throwing things" but "How about a story?" or "What do you want to play with now?"



• Principle: Don't threaten, act. Timeouts (and any punishments or rewards) are most effective when they follow immediately after the unacceptable behavior. They also need to be predictable--that is, your child should know that any time she acts in certain unacceptable ways (refusing to do what you tell her to, for example), she is sure to be put in timeout. If it sometimes happens that she doesn't get timeout--for example, if she is able to plead or argue her way out of it--then timeout becomes much less powerful.
  
  What this means is, if you give one warning ("Stop right now or you're going to have a timeout") and your child doesn't stop, you have to give the timeout right away. If you threaten to give a timeout, then threaten again, and then again, you are teaching your child to ignore your threats, because you yourself are not taking them seriously and following through. So remember: If you warn your child that she is headed for a timeout, be prepared to give one.

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