When your child misbehaves, is making him stand in the corner punishment enough? A friend of mine swears by it. She theorizes that if fun makes a kid’s world go round, boredom just sucks the life out of it.
strong>Boredom is the worst kind of time-out for a kid, she shares. And what’s more boring than staring at a blank wall?
For standing-in-the-corner to be an effective time-out for kids though, there are certain things you have to make sure of. First, make sure your kid’s facing a blank wall — no paintings or crayons she can access for some wall-doodling. Second, …read more

Our daughter will turn 12 years old next month. When she makes mistakes, we find that although time outs still work, it’s the taking away of a privilege or the use of a favorite gadget like her mobile phone, iPod or laptop that gets to her.

We only resort to time outs or taking away her privileges after we have given several verbal warnings to her. After each offense and once she has apologized, we do sit down and talk to her about what she did. We ask her if she knows why we got upset. We always have a ‘debrief’ …read more

I never was a huge advocate of using time out as a means of disciplining the kids. Why? It did not work, in my opinion. I spawned the kind of children who would punch holes in the wall as they stood screaming in the corner. I have the kind of kids who know how to wear me down by getting out so many times that I finally give up or forget that they were ever in the corner, in the first place. It just wasn’t worth the headache it gave me to keep the perpetrator in the corner long enough to …read more

Every person surely remembers the great story by P.D. Eastman, about the bird who hatches and goes in search of his mother. He encounters many inanimate objects in his quest, whom he poses the question, “Are You My Mother?” to. As I read the book to my little ones, this morning, it made me think of the role of a parent and discipline. Every mom has different ways of disciplining their children. Some are against spanking, some are not. Some find time out the only acceptable form of corrective action, some have many forms. Some parents are the only ones who discipline their kids …read more