So I was out to eat and this child(maybe 3 years old) in the booth next to us started crying loudly. The mom tried to calm him down but he started to go into tantrum mode and fussed even more. So she picked him up and walked out of the restaurant to a bench outside our window. We could hear her ask him, “look at me, what’s upsetting you?” To which he responded with more crying. So she says, “Well you’re clearly overwhelmed, so we’re going to sit out here and take a break until you can compose yourself and tell me what’s wrong.” Which is exactly what happened after a couple minutes. Anyways I just think it’s so good to speak to your children in a logical, respectful manner instead of shushing them and leaving them to deal with their stress alone.
I’ve done this a few times with my youngest niece (she gets angry A LOT) and it works really well, to the point that she’ll come up to me and just tell me what’s wrong.
That’s the idea of how you’re SUPPOSED to do timeouts. It’s not a punishment to isolate them, but to give them an opportunity to calm down and say why they did what they did and if they did something wrong to explain why what they did was wrong or hurtful. (Also it’s supposed to be like one minute for every year old the child is or until they calm down enough to return to what they were doing, not like half an hour like my mom tried to pull on me as a kid).
