Child and punishment, would a time-out be an effective punishment for showing the seriousness for these kinds of misbehavior?

Assuming the child is under 12.

keying a car – immediate time out and then make them do yard work every weekend for the person that owned the car.

Tossing items off an overpass – this can kill someone, a water balloon broke my cousins nose when it went through his windshield. He should be turned into the police.

Hunting cats – could get him killed if he shoots the wrong person’s cat. Grounded for at least a month. no tv, no video games, no friends over, no phone.

Tee peeing a house, if they helped clean it up the next day, no further punishment.

Sucker punching siblings, grounded for a week.

Playing with fire, same as hunting cats.

Trying to get the sibling to do dumb stuff, nothing unless the sibling tries it and gets hurt.

Trespassing on private property – make them confront the owner and confess, let the property owner have a hand in deciding the punishment.

Spitting on teachers or hitting them – Grounded.

Using grounding or time out only once will probably not work, punish them every time you catch them. You have to be consistent in your punishments. If taking away the toys doesn’t work, take everything out of their room except the mattress and an egg crate. Each day of appropriate behavior they can have one thing back.

If the punishments don’t work, get therapy.

Most of these situations can be avoided by proper supervision. Training a child to behave starts when they are born, and if it is not done properly, the things you have listed can be the result.

If this is already occurring, the family needs parenting and family counseling.

When my son was 12, he demonstrated a fascination with fire in our yard, when left alone for a couple of hours. We contacted the Fire Department, and they enrolled him in a class which explores the dangers of fire. That worked quite well.

Shit, I’d get the belt.

Time out was originally designed for a single purpose —to remove stimulation from a very very young child having a temper tantrum. The theory was that toddlers and preschoolers are having a neurological meltdown from stimulation overload when they have a tantrum and the best way to deal with it is toss them into a familiar corner or room with little or nothing in it to excite them and let them figure out how to calm themselves down. The kids are allowed out of time out as soon as they stop spazzing out. If they are older (like over three years old—two year olds will likely forget what was going on) , THEN the punishment is doled out if the kids were misbehaving before the tantrum. It was thought to believe that basically you can’t deal with a kid in meltdown mode, so you have to do what you can to let it pass quickly.

It was never intended to be a place you go and think about what you did wrong. And except for kids with autism or extremely poor impulse control and still having tantrums far too old, it wasn’t meant for kids over 5 or 6.

NONE of those actions you mention fit the criteria for time out as it was originally intended. Of course, time out has mutated into being sort of the opposite of what it was supposed to be as well.

Punishments should fit the crimes, and focus on making the child understand why their act was wrong. When kids do damage to other’s property, they should be made to clean up the mess and earn the money to pay for the destruction they’ve caused. When it comes to hurting other people, they should be made to think about how that makes other people feel. Perhaps they should be forced to volunteer with people who are disabled or are suffering in some way—some sort of activity designed to generate empathy with other human beings. For hurting animals, they should volunteer at the local spca.

For all of the above it is time for a trip to the child psycologist, there are reasons a child acts out in those ways and there is more going on there. A simple time out is not going to fix a problem with a child mentally.

According to my grandchildren, time out does not work. We raised our two grandaughters. They both were not perfect angels by any stretch of the imagination. One grandaughter told me that standing in the corner for 30 minutes, only gave her time to think how she would not be caught, the next time.

I have said this before on Fluther, but I believe it needs to be repeated here:

One grandaughter was going to the mall with three of her girlfriends. She was given $30 to spend. Apparently, this was not enough for her, so she stole an additional $20 from my billfold. I discovered the missing money, shortly after she left for the mall. I waited until she came home to confront her and the missing money.

She confessed to the theft and I set her punishment. I advised her that I would have given her the extra money…..all she had to do was ask. Time out would not work here, so she was given 30 days to stay in her room, without any entertainment. No tv, no radio, no IPod, no cellphone and no visitors. She was allowed her meals, the bathroom and to study. That was it.

My grandaughter did her 30 days with 5 days deducted for good behavior.

Punishment has to coincide with bad behavior.

Any child that plays with fire in the house, needs phsycological attention, not time out.

Later in her life, my grandaughter told me that she deserved the 30 days and will never forget how she stole $20 dollars from her papa.

Any and all of those infractions is to me a clear sign of poor parenting and I would put both parents in the naughty corner and send them to bed early with no dessert.

All of these are way beyond a time out. If one child under the age of ten is doing all this, they need serious therapy.

For my kids, time out worked well when they were young, preschool age and younger.

@Hypocrisy_Central – I had to leave the last child punishment thread because I was very uncomfortable where it was going. I am under the impression (and I could be wrong) here that you are attempting to paint the alternative to corporal punishment as “time outs”.

In my experience, people who take parenting seriously use neither corporal punishment or “time outs”. “Timeout” is a bad word in my circles.

I have to agree with @keobooks completely. When used properly, a time-out is an effective tool for very young children. If you have an older child and are still using time out in the naughty chair, you don’t get the concept.

Also, I think @tom_g is absolutely correct about corporal punishment vs. time out. This question is nothing more than an immature attempt at making parents who don’t use corporal punishment look like wimps who let their kids get away with the terrible behaviors listed above. Thank you, @Hypocrisy_Central for once again proving that the only parenting experts are people who don’t have children.

Like everything else in life, parenting is full of gray areas. Anyone who claims otherwise doesn’t have children. Good parents are good parents, and whether or not those parents choose to dole out corporal punishment from time to time isn’t going to make or break the kid’s life. I’m sure we can all give examples of kids who are/aren’t spanked and do/don’t behave terribly. It seems like every single parenting debate is this way now. Breastfeeding, bottle feeding, working, not working, public school, private school, organic food, junk food…no matter what, someone will tell you you’re doing it wrong and your kid is screwed because that one single parenting decision determines everything about your child’s future!

Give me a break.

The only one I might consider a time out is sucker punching their sibling, if the child is 5 or under. Older than that and something else needs to be done. Everything else, I can barely imagine being done by a very young child, say <8 because, how are they alone to do it? At 10 these all show something that needs to be addressed by a professional possibly. Especially if all of it is being done by one kid. If it is just examples of what many different children might do, then the parent should take it as a warning that how the child thinks, or how he controls his behavior might need some help, talk to the child about why they did what they did, and create a consequence that will teach them a lesson. Like @YARNLADY‘s example of the fire department. A parent I guess needs to figure out if the child is actually somewhat sociopathic, has not empathy for the person they are harming, and actually enjoys doing mean things, or if they don’t know how to handle their anger, or they were going along with peer pressure, etc. I guess

I would try various punishments if my child did not respond to and curb their bad behavior after being spoken to. Grounding them, taking away their toys, taking away priviledges. Most kids I knew growing up who did not care about the consequences continued to bad stuff anyway. They took the risk and hoped not to get caught, or were driven to bad things for some reason. I have to think there was something really wrong with those kids, or their families were even more dysfunctional than mine.

I think punishment style needs to be based on a profound understanding, by the parents, of how sensitive their kids are. I’ve said this before, I was an extremely sensitive kid. My parents only needed to give me a stern talking to and I would be persuaded never to misbehave in that way again. I would have been traumatized if my parents had been very harsh with me; a harsh level of punishment was simply not necessary. That message doesn’t get through other kids’ heads as readily. I get the sense that any kid misbehaving in the ways you listed probably isn’t too sensitive, as sensitive kids are usually profoundly aware of the consequences of their actions. As such, the parents should take away privileges when the child misbehaves and talk to him very seriously about the consequences of him actions. Maybe even impose similar consequences on the child so that he understands just how he’s making other people feel when he does these bad things. If he scratches someone’s car purposefully, maybe it’s time to scratch one of his toy cars and see how it makes him feel. I don’t know, I’m not anywhere near ready to be a parent so I don’t know how good or bad of an idea that would be. All I know for sure is that some kids are very sensitive and will be very hurt by a heavy punishment imposed by his beloved parents.

@Mariah I like your answer. The problem with scratching one the child’s toys is it is mafia behavior. Generally we try to teach that retaliation is not ok, not to be done by the victim himself. Even our formal judicial system in America has the state prosecute violent acts, the victim does not bring the charge against the offender. But, I also at times feel like the only way someone is going to learn how something feels, if they cannot habe empathy to begin with, is if the same thing happens to them. So, it is a quandary for sure.

@JLeslie Very true, you raise a good point – I don’t want to teach my child that two wrongs make a right!

Just to expand on my answer above, I think forcing children to work through the moral calculus and possible outcomes of their behavior is a very valuable exercise. E.g. the water balloon could kill the driver. The driver has a family he needs to feed, parents who love him, and children who depend on him. What if the children have nowhere to go if their father dies? They might have to be raised in foster care. How would you feel if your mother and I were killed and you had to go live with strangers? etc. Continue pursuing this line of reasoning until you can see the child develop a genuine sense of remorse and sympathy.

The goal is to probe all levels of the outcome, and show how their negative actions can cause a ripple effect that can be much more destructive than they were thinking. The Socratic Method is excellent for making children more thoughtful and wise.

Then when you follow this up with the community service type activities, it should be followed up by reinforcing the rippling positives of their behavior.

When paying for the cost of any property they destroyed, I would make them also purchase a gift valued at around 50% of the value of the damage they caused, and to personally deliver it with a sincere apology. So if my child keyed a car and it cost $500 to repair, I would pay for the damages, and my child would first raise $250 to purchase a gift for the victim of their crime and personally deliver it with a full apology, explaining the work they did to raise the money. Then they would work to repay me the $500 it cost me to fix the car. The child would be grounded until their debts were paid, so the harder they work, the more quickly they could earn their privileges back.

As with everyone else who understand the issue, time-out is not used for anyone over the age of 6. It’s a way of getting kids to cool down and my son actually liked it because it did calm him down. Of course, it was a little tough at the beginning to get him to do it, but once we got through that, no problem.

These other issues are much more difficult. I have good friends whose kids have gotten into trouble with the cops for doing things like throwing beer bottles all over a parking lot or onto a highway or something. It seems that usually, with good kids, the shame of being caught is enough prevent more such behavior.

However, most likely the behavior comes because of an association with another kid, so the first thing to do is to stop them from seeing each other.

Other than that, I don’t know. It would depend on the situation. Maybe it indicates that a therapist is needed. Maybe something else. I would hate to lock my children in a room. It would be better to force them to go outside. For my son, I might take the computer away and surround him with books. For my daughter—well, I can’t imagine her doing anything like that list, so if she did, it would mean something very serious was going on.

TP’ing a house… Where I live, if someone’s house gets TP’ed it’s usually a compliment- they like you enough to tease you. In other places, it might not have the same connotation.

The thing about TP’ing under 12 is, he would have had to sneak out in the middle of the night to accomplish that—it’s not the TP’ing that I have a problem with, but the sneaking out part. I’d address the sneak-out by taking away privileges.

Talking. Consequences. More talking.