Timeout? Gentle parenting? What one expert says about child discipline

For a lot of us parents, it feels like we’re just trying to figure out this parenting thing as we go. When a child acts out and hits another kid or misbehaves in other ways, what should we do?

There’s a myriad of suggestions on social media on how to best handle these situations.

As part of a weeklong series on parenting, LAist’s AirTalk covered how parents treat each of their kids differently (or not), where we get our child-raising instincts from, and other topics.

And the series also covered discipline. While it used to be much more pervasive, spanking is still relatively common in American households.

Here’s the AirTalk conversation with Cara Goodwin, a licensed clinical psychologist and the founder of ParentingTranslator.com.

Spanking is ineffective and harmful

While still common, the evidence shows that spanking is not only ineffective in changing a child’s behavior, but is harmful.

“It is associated with many negative outcomes in children,” Goodwin said, like relationship problems, anxiety and depression.

A study from the University of Michigan found spanking has the same effects as adverse childhood experiences, or ACES, for children — traumatic experiences that affect a child’s future and puts them at higher risk for physical and mental health issues.

Time-out used correctly

To replace physical discipline, “time-out” was brought in to give parents another strategy, Goodwin said.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and pediatricians have recommended the use of time-out as a consequence of their behaviors and to help kids calm down. But there’s been recent controversy over the years about time out being harmful or further traumatizing a child.

“However, the research really consistently supports time-out both as an effective method and also research has failed to find any associations with negative outcomes for timeout,” Goodwin said.

It’s important that it’s done correctly, though. Surveys have shown that time out has been employed by many parents incorrectly. Goodwin says it shouldn’t be used in a harsh or punitive way

“It's really just saying to your child… ‘You hit your sister,’ for example, and ‘now we're going to time out to calm down.’ And when it's really framed as an opportunity for everybody to calm down and get a break from the situation, it can be really effective for children,” she said.

Goodwin also said time-outs are only effective when most of the time, a child has warm and loving interactions with their parents.

“We're thinking about a lot of these strategies used in a holistic way,” she said.

Best practices of time-out include being boring — so no toys — and being short in duration.

What about the ‘gentle parenting’ movement?

Gentle parenting has gained popularity among influencers and social media. While Goodwin said it’s not clearly defined, the general idea is valuing self-care in a child.

“[That includes] unconditional acceptance of children, having empathy for children, respecting children. And these are all incredible principles,” Goodwin said. But she questions the movement when they recommend not using many evidence-based strategies.

“A lot of gentle parenting advocates say there should be no externally imposed consequences on children,” she said. “We really have no evidence for any of these claims against consequences, timeout, praise, rewards.”

She added that it’s important to know what works best for your child. “If gentle parenting is working for you, that's wonderful,” Goodwin said. But she added that parents shouldn’t worry about feeling like they’ve failed at parenting if they have to use consequences like timeout.

“It is all about what works best for each individual, and there's a lot of research showing that what's really important is that parents are attuned to their individual child and what works,” she said.

Listen to the episode