For new parents, there are lots of visits to the pediatrician during the first year, along with support and advice on feedings, sleep patterns and other practical matters.  Then, when your child hits the 1 year mark, the visits decrease, and that’s when the behavior shaping process kicks in.  For those of us who grew up in a highly disciplined household, the idea of a time-out is laughable if you don’t have a clear and detailed understanding of how it works.  The North Carolina ABCD Project published just such a guide on the web, which provides a nice level of detail on how the whole process should work, including behaviors of parents and other siblings during the time-out period. 

Wow, we could have used this type of information.  Hopefully it will be beneficial to our readers. I hear many parents and caregivers throwing the term “time-out” around, and when they describe how it works, I immediately know why we have so many ill-behaved children in the world.  We also tried time-outs with few positive results, and resorted to pulling privileges, but I think if we had implemented the process differently, we would have experienced more success.  Maybe some of our new parents will have the opportunity to be more informed.