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Do you use timeouts? Parents in my class often comment "hey
I'm using a timeout and it doesn't work" or "it doesn't work very well".
Well, the truth is timeouts are not very effective
and why is that? Well if you want to take a minute to consider
what is the purpose behind your time out. Hopefully it's to give you a break from
the child,
yes, and to give the child a break and time to
calm down but it's also ultimately
to change the behavior. Here's the problem with the time out.
What does your child do the whole time they're in a time out?
They may be shuffling around they may be tapping their foot
they may be looking around. They're anticipating
getting up. What they're not doing is really
thinking about what they did and being motivated to change their behavior.
So that's why timeouts don't work very well.
Here's another reason. In Love and LogicĀ® we know
that for a child to make a good decision they have to be
in the frontal lobe, this part of the brain up here. That's the part where we
evaluate or
we make judgments and make good decisions, or hopefully good
decisions, but when you're in your brain stem
which is you know sort of what we call the caveman brain,
the part where you go to fight and flight, you can't make good decisions when you're there.
and when a child is in a time out
they're annoyed. They're frustrated. They want to get up
they want to get on with their life and so they're not really in the thinking mode.
So how do you get the child from the fight and flight
which is the brainstem, to the thinking mode
where they can think about what they did? In Love and LogicĀ® we have a tool
called the "Uh Oh song". The "Uh Oh song"
replaces time out because it's a way
to get the child to think about what they did, reflect,
and perhaps make a better decision the next time. In my class
we teach this tool in week 3. There's about five steps
if you'd like some help with another tool
that is more effective in changing a child's behavior
than a timeout give me a call. I'd like to help.
Thanks for watching.