Your child does something wrong. You tell him not to do it. He does it again. You put him in timeout and he learns not to do what you tell him not to do. He learns that there are boundaries that cannot be crossed. He learns that, as the parent, you are in charge. And that is a good thing. Or maybe it’s not a good thing, but it is inevitable. After all, you are the parent, and you are responsible for both your child’s safety and his or her upbringing, so he has to listen to you, and if he doesn’t, he has to learn how to. Right?
I have struggled to understand what parenting is. Parents are in charge. They hold authority over children. If parents can’t control their children, chaos will ensue. If parents can’t control their children, they are bad parents. These are the suppositions that have been in place in my head since I was a child. They are the suppositions that I was taught by my culture and my upbringing. They are also the suppositions that I learned to question and disagree with as I made my way through life.
But then I became a parent, and I became responsible for raising another human being, and my child’s behavior seemed to become a reflection of me; and suddenly there were so many new situations, all with their own varied circumstances, factors, and components. And there were a lot of times when I had no idea how to handle these situations. And in the times where I had lost all control of the situation and had found myself in a panic, the suppositions of my childhood suddenly came rushing back to me in the form of answers like these: Take control. Lay down the law. Be authority. Etc.
The first time I put my son in timeout, I picked him up and put him in the foyer of our house. He didn’t kick or scream or try to resist because he didn’t understand what was happening. Then I closed the door and held it shut. He tried to open it, but couldn’t. At that point, I think I probably said something like, Stop it! You’re in timeout, but I don’t remember. What I do remember is that my son started to scream and cry. He began screaming and crying immediately. Then he started pounding on the door. After that, he lay down on the floor and began kicking the walls. He was probably only one and a half when I did this, maybe a little older.
My wife, who is Japanese, was shocked. I don’t know if her nationality or upbringing had anything to do with her reaction, but she was shocked. She couldn’t believe I was doing what I was doing. Does he even know what he did wrong? she asked me. Is he going to understand? If he doesn’t understand, what good is putting him in timeout going to do? He’s going to think you’re just bullying him.
My wife made great points, but I believed that I was teaching my son necessary life lessons about rules and boundaries. I believed that I wasn’t being violent toward him. I believed that what I was doing was not only necessary, but was the best way, and I told my wife that where I come from, this is what we do. And so this is what we did. From time to time, both my wife and I threatened to put our son in timeout, and as a last resort, we did put him there.
After letting my son scream and cry and kick for a minute or so, I opened the door to our foyer and scooped my son up from the floor. He was soaked in tears, kicking and sobbing. Understandably, he didn’t want to be held by me. But I held him close and apologized anyway. He continued to cry, so I sat down with him on my lap and waited for him to settle down. I wiped his tears and wiped his nose. I treated him lovingly. Then I proceeded to explain to him why I had put him in timeout. I told him that I hadn’t wanted to put him in timeout but that he had given me no other choice. I blamed the whole thing on him. I absolved myself from being responsible for his tears. I, the adult, the responsible one, even went so far as to release myself from the responsibility of my own decision.
It seems ridiculous to me now, but at the time I didn’t understand that just because my son chose not to listen to me does not mean that he chose to be put in timeout. Putting him in timeout was my decision, mine alone, and yet I had told my son that this decision was his. I had told my son that he, the one-and-a-half-year-old child, was making decisions for me. Me, the responsible adult.
I knew at the time that something wasn’t quite right about this idea of timeout, but I didn’t really understand what it was; so I continued to use timeout as a way to ‘correct’ my son’s behavior. When he was doing something that I didn’t agree with, something that would damage property or hurt the people around him, when he was being overly defiant and testing my limits, I would threaten him with timeout, and this threat would terrify him.
Seeing my son’s response to my threat of timeout made me further realize that something wasn’t quite right with this method of child rearing. But again, it didn’t make me stop using timeout. It just made me change the way that I implemented it. It made me change the way that I used timeout as a threat.
Rather than beginning with questions and statements like, Do you want to go to timeout? or, If you do that I again, you’re going to go to timeout, I started beginning with explanations. You know, it’s really not okay to bite people. It hurts. Do you want me to bite you? No? Well then don’t bit your sister. If you do it again, I’m going to put you in timeout. You don’t want to go there, do you? Then, if my son didn’t heed my explanation and warning, I would put him, kicking and screaming, in timeout.
I recognized that what I was doing was cruel, but I thought it was necessary. To make the whole experience less traumatic, I began explaining to my son why I was putting him in timeout before I put him there, and I began explaining to him how long I was going to be putting him in timeout for. I would show my son a timer, set it for two minutes, push start, and close the door. I theorized that explaining to him the reason for and the length of his sentence would make his experience less agonizing.
But every time I put him in timeout, he would do the same thing all over again. He would scream and cry, kick the walls and pound on the floor. No matter how I changed the procedure, the results never changed. It always ended with my son being terrified and distraught, and me having to comfort him.
I love my son very much. He is my first child. Prior to his birth, I had no idea how to be a parent, but slowly I am learning as I go. What I can tell you that I have learned after three-and-a-half years of doing this is that, no matter how you do it, putting your child in timeout is wrong. It is violent. It doesn’t put a stop to the behavior that you want to stop. And most importantly, it takes all responsibility away from you, the adult, the person who is supposed to be modeling responsibility, and it places a burden of false responsibility on your child.
Being a parent is tricky business. When we are at a loss for what to do and when we don’t know where to turn, we are often influenced by factors in our own past that we don’t even recognize. While it may not be easy to see the things that are influencing our thoughts, behaviors, and parenting strategies, we don’t have to repeat the mistakes of the past by doing things the way they have always been done.
We have other options.
For help finding child rearing ideas and strategies that are nonviolent and produce positive results, please consider looking at these websites: www.peacefulparent.com, www.ahaparenting.com, and parentingbeyondpunishment.com. I have found them to be very helpful. Also please follow me here, at boxcarblue on steemit, as I describe my adventure into peaceful parenting.