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April 24, 2022 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:30
EFFECTIVE TIMEOUTS FOR PARENTS!
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Yeah, I'm wondering about when you think it's acceptable to put kids in timeout, especially, I mean, we have a lot of young kids and they sometimes get into, you know, my toy, my toy, now we're going to brawl over whose toy it is, that kind of thing. And so, like, we're trying to implement peaceful parenting and I'm wondering what your thoughts are in terms of when it's acceptable to put kids in timeout and when it isn't.
What is the age range of the kids you're talking about?
Zero to eight years.
So, let's see. We have not quite three months.
Then we've got 22 months, three years, four and a half, and eight.
All right. Okay.
The worst problems are the 22-month-old and the three-year-old.
Those are the two that really go at it the most.
Right.
Okay.
And how often are they playing unsupervised?
I guess it depends on what you mean by unsupervised, but I would say that I'm often busy with other things like dishes and laundry and that kind of thing, but they're within earshot of a parent most of the time.
How possible is it?
And the reason I'm saying this is not because I'm sure you are busy with other things, but for a short period of time, how possible is it to move the chores that can be moved, like laundry and so on, to move the chores until after the kids are in bed or your husband is home or one of them is napping or whether or not this level of conflict is not occurring?
So my husband works from home and he's off and around.
And he does not like to have the kids around when he's working from home, but...
He's here and he helps out with that.
The laundry, I will often have them with me while I'm doing that because they like to just hang out and do that with me when they're not shoving the laundry onto the floor.
But I don't know.
It's not possible to leave that stuff until after they're in bed.
It's kind of like a...
Well, come on.
Let's be fair. It is physically possible, right?
And the reason I'm saying this is you cannot possibly expect a 22-month-old and a 3-year-old to know the niceties of sharing.
That's like asking them to ride a bike, right?
Absolutely. Okay, so why would you punish them for something that they can't possibly know?
Well, they're, you know, they're practicing, but it's more like sometimes you have to do things and then it's, I guess it's like less of a, I don't know.
It's hard to describe. I don't know if I would describe it so much as time out as more like you have to go and do something and they have to not hit each other while you're going to do something.
Okay, so the issue is that they're hitting each other?
Right. Well, sometimes they'll take things from each other and then usually that immediately leads to hitting each other.
And sometimes it's hard to tell who did what and then what happened because they're not all that reliable about telling the truth and one of them is still working on language.
I get that. Now, have they been exposed, I don't necessarily mean in your home and so on, but have they been exposed or witnessed any aggression such as toy taking or confinement or picking up a kicking kid who doesn't want to be picked up?
Have they been exposed to any kind of aggression in their environment over the course of their young lives?
Let's see.
Well, we've definitely both in past years had to work on not shouting at them.
Both my husband and I have had to work on that.
So I would say it's been a while.
We've been... I don't know.
We've used time out occasionally.
So we have put them in their rooms sometimes.
So you pick up a resisting child and you put the child in another location to calm something down, is that right?
Right. Okay, so you have modeled to them that you use aggression, size, and strength to get what you want.
Because you understand that they're 22 and 36 months, right?
So they don't have big moral centrists.
They just say, okay, mommy and daddy use aggression to get what they want.
So when I want something, I should use aggression.
I mean, punishing them for being, in a sense, little mirrors of you guys seems a little unfair, if that makes sense.
Sure. Well, we try to use time out for only enforcing physical safety and property rights.
Well, okay, but you are using your size and your strength to dominate a child, right?
That's like saying the government taxes us to protect our property, right?
Can you clarify?
Okay, so the child doesn't know what's right or what's wrong.
They only know what mommy and daddy do.
And if mommy and daddy, listen, it's wonderful that you've pulled back on the yelling at your kids, and I think this is great, so I don't mean to, you know, paint you as some, I don't know, monster, of course, right?
It's great that you're into peaceful parenting, but from your child's perspective...
They see that when mommy and daddy want to impose their will, they use their superior size and strength.
They don't reason. They don't sit down and teach us better necessarily.
They don't find some more peaceful way to intervene.
No, we do. No, I'm saying there are times.
Hang on, hang on. I'm not saying that you always just grab your kids and treat them like a basketball.
I'm not saying that. I'm sorry if I meant that.
I was not trying to make that point.
But they have seen that in the past with you using verbal aggression and you picking up kids and carrying them screaming from the room.
And that leaves a pretty significant impression on your children's minds, right?
That when you want to get something really badly, when it's really important...
I mean, I'm sure that they don't fight with each other 24-7, right?
But when it's really important, they are doing what you are doing, which is trying to get their way by using their size and strength or physical courage or something like that.
Does that make sense? Yes.
Yeah. So my question is, when is it acceptable to do that?
Right? Like if you have talked to a kid and you say, you know, it's not okay to hit somebody and this is why and you need to apologize for hitting them.
Hang on, hang on. No, no, no. Wait, wait, wait.
Hang on. Hang on.
You don't have the right to lecture your children not to use physical force to get what they want because you use it to get what you want in terms of timeouts.
So your kids are going to be confused.
I mean, is there a difference of degree, though?
Because if you're hurting somebody, that's different from if you're, you know, moving them, stopping them hurting you.
I don't know.
I feel like there's a difference between using force to harm somebody and using force to restrain somebody.
Well, but when you used verbal force, right?
When you raised your voices and yelled and all that, right?
I mean, that's definitely a form of aggression, right?
I mean, if your kids were yelling at each other the way you were yelling at your kids, you wouldn't be too pleased, right?
Right. So, the first thing, I mean, I don't know what the exact right answer is.
I'll just tell you what I would do in your situation.
Is I would sit down with my kids and I would say the following.
I would say, I'm just going to take my headphones off because it's great that we're talking about kids, but I can hear them in the background.
So I'll put these back on in a sec.
So I would sit down with my kids and I would say, look, I'm the mom.
I'm in charge of the family.
I'm in charge of how things work.
You'd sit down with your husband and say, look, we're the parents.
We're in charge of how things work in this family.
We've got four kids together.
And we, over the course of your young lives, however you would sell this to them, right?
Maybe diagrams or whatever, right?
We've yelled, right? You remember mommy and daddy yelling and we've also picked you up and we've moved you crying and kicking and screaming into another room and we've locked you in there.
Now, that was a bad idea.
That was a wrong idea. We're really sorry about that.
Because it's got to be kind of confusing for you when we come storming in, yelling and grabbing and picking up and locking you in another room and then say, well, you can't use force.
You can't use your size and strength against your little brother.
It's like we have been, as parents, using our size and strength and volume to...
Impose our will upon you.
Now, we may have had good reasons, and I didn't like what you were doing to your brother or your sister, but we did use our size and our strength to get what we wanted from your perspective, right?
And that was wrong. So, we have a problem, which is...
We use aggression in this family, and it's primarily us as parents.
We modeled the aggression.
I'm not saying you're abusers, just so you know.
But we modeled the aggression, and now you guys have picked up on that aggression.
Plus, you're younger and you're a toddler, so there's a lot of aggression flowing around kind of naturally.
But we need to find a way, as a family, we need to find a way as a family to not use aggression to get what we want.
Right? You have a brother and you want a toy from your brother and if you just push your brother over and grab the toy, you get the toy but then you get your brother running at you, fists flying and then you get mom and dad upset and angry and we have to find a way about the toy.
How are we going to deal with the toys?
Obviously it's not a healthy thing to try and buy enough toys for everyone and that there'll be conflicts no matter what.
So how are we going to deal with the toys?
And we are sorry that we picked you up and carried you kicking and screaming from a room and locked you in another room.
We are sorry that we raised your voice when you were younger.
That was wrong. And we were raised in this kind of way.
We're really trying to change things.
But we as a family, we've got to find some way.
That we can share without this punchiness.
And also, you know, one of you 22 months, one of you is three.
There's no way that you're going to know how to deal with all the sharing.
But we've got to at least have some kind of rules, right?
What is a fair rule?
You know, there's a couple of things we could do, right?
What we could do is, you know, you've seen those egg timers, right?
Those egg timers where they have the hourglass and the sand goes through, right?
So we could get an egg timer, which is five minutes, right?
And you could say, okay, you get the toy, put the egg timer.
At the end of the egg timer, do you give the toy to the other kid?
Does everyone agree on that?
Right? Okay. Maybe we can use the egg timer.
You can also get those kitchen timers.
You know, the white, they're usually white.
They've got a clock that you turn and, you know, you can set it five minutes, 10 minutes, half an hour, whatever.
Right? So maybe what we can do is if someone has a toy, you say, okay, what's the, what's the timer going to be?
Can we do 10 minutes, five minutes, 15 minutes, whatever it is.
Right? Can we do that?
And find some way that you guys can manage this because right now you're grabbing toys and you're not enjoying each other's company.
And that's a real shame because, you know, your brothers got to love each other.
Your sisters, your siblings got to love each other for your whole life.
And I think we kind of pulled things off the rails a little here, which we're really sorry about.
Really sorry. It was the wrong thing to do.
But we got to find a way to fix this all together.
And let's...
I do like the idea of...
Let's sit down together and figure out what we can do.
Because we can't solve this when we're in the middle of conflict.
We can't solve this when we're in the middle of conflict, because then it's just chaos.
We need to do it when we're really calm.
Everyone's relaxed. They've had their dinner.
They've had their bottle. They're like, how are we going to do this, right?
Now, for the 22-month-old, it's probably something that can be done.
She's still kind of young for the kitchen timers and five minutes and that kind of stuff, right?
But I would say that...
No, I know she's talking. I just said I would take my headphones off, and I'll tell her when I put my headphones back on.
I'm aware of that, but I need to get this across, right, in sort of one solid way.
Because I'm not just talking to her. I'm talking to everyone, right?
So I told her my headphones would be off.
So just be patient. I appreciate that.
And then you can have a nice long chat.
And listen, don't tell me about, like, well, we didn't do it this way or that way at some point or another, because this is a show for everyone, right?
You cannot hold children to a rule they have not agreed to.
You cannot hold children to a rule they have.
And the big challenge as a parent...
Is to sit down with them and say, okay, do we have a rule where everyone can hit each other to get what they want?
And they're going to say no. They don't want that rule.
Okay, so no hitting.
So how are we going to deal with toys that you want to play with?
If your sibling has a toy that you want to play with, how are we going to deal with that?
And let them come up with the solutions.
And then, this could be a couple of days, it could be a week, it's well worth spending this time.
Once they have agreed, you've got to teach them the power of the promise.
The power of the promise is the key to what used to be called discipline.
So if they say, we're not going to grab toys, everyone agree, we're not going to grab toys.
If you have an issue, you know, let's say that there's a five-minute timer, the timer goes off, the toy isn't relinquished, what do we do?
Because you've got to come up with these contingencies because not everything is going to go smoothly.
Why? Because they're a bag full of kids.
Things don't even go smoothly with adults, right?
So what you have to say is what happens if people don't follow the rules?
Well, then you've got to come to get mama, you've got to come to get daddy, and so on, right?
Plus, you know, you may be able to hear the ding, right?
And this is why maybe the kitchen timer is better than the hourglass.
So the ding goes off, oh, it's time to switch toys, right?
Does everyone agree? And all that, right?
You need them to feel that they have created and agreed to the rules.
Because otherwise you're just some distant legislature that has passed a rule that the kids don't agree with.
Any rule that is passed and enforced upon you that you've never agreed with or had no part of formulating, you will simply immediately try to find a way to get around it.
Right? Immediately, the kids will try and find a way to get around it because they haven't agreed to them.
You know this about your life.
You know that if somebody... You're part of some homeowner's association and they just say, oh, we're doubling your dues or, oh, you can't mini-golf anymore, whatever.
You all have to paint your garages.
You're like, the first thing you do is you get annoyed.
You get resentful. You don't want...
That in your life.
That's annoying. That's bad.
You don't want that. Whereas if you sit there and say, we have a problem, we have this expense that came up.
If you're part of the definition of the response, you're part of the definition of the rules, and you agree to ahead of time, it's all peace and grace.
The only way to get peace is to have people participate in the rules that they agree to.
And so, with your kids, yeah, they don't want yelling, they don't want hitting, and, you know, if you keep hitting each other, one of you is going to end up in the hospital.
If you keep hitting each other, we have to take away the toys because, you know, like, we have to find some way that you guys can enjoy the toys without hitting each other, and, you know, part of that's on us.
It's not like you kids are just mean people who hit, right?
So, if they are part of the rules that they agree to abide by, and they then promise To obey those rules.
Guess what? They're going to break their promise.
Why? Because they're kids. Because even adults break their promises.
I said I'd be here at 7.
I got here at 7.02.
So they will break their promise.
And that's totally fine.
Absolutely part of the plan.
It's not like, well, you kids promised.
How dare you break your promise? We do it all the time.
Everybody knows that. So what you do...
Is you sit down, you say, okay, we had a deal.
You would keep your word. And it's not like some heavy, you bad kids who didn't keep your word, because, you know, again, it happens, right?
You probably had promises to yourself not to yell at your kids.
You yelled at your kids. Everybody breaks their promises.
But we say, what we say is, well, we can't have a...
We can't have a family where nobody keeps their promises because then I don't even know how we're going to interact with anything, right?
I mean, would you like it if I promised to take you swimming tomorrow and then just refuse to take you swimming tomorrow?
You'd be mad and upset and then you wouldn't be able to trust any promise I made.
So just make it universal, right?
And recognize that you wouldn't want a boss...
Who just told you everything to do and then locked you in a storage closet if they were displeased.
That would not be a good work environment for you.
And kids need to participate in the world that's around them.
They need to participate in the rules that are created.
And they need to have conversations about what happens when people inevitably don't.
Pass those rules. Now, you going to the idea of, well, what we need is some kind of escalation of force and timeouts and forcing them to sit here and locking them in the room there and grabbing them out of this and, you know, taking this away.
I understand where that comes from because this is how we were all raised and I get all of that.
But, you know, if you're into peaceful parenting...
Recognize that your kids are brilliant, recognize that if you can get them to participate in the rules that govern them, then you won't have to discipline them.
You'll have to remind them and the reminder will be fairly constant but that is the way to approach it if you want to not end up with this escalation.
Where does the escalation end?
All they'll do is just fight it and you've just shown them once again that size and strength and power are the way to get what you want and guess what?
They'll just keep getting bigger and you'll keep getting older.
So, okay, I'll put my headphones back on and I'll leave it over to you but Yeah, and I'm not saying this is all your parenting, so I hope you won't waste everyone's time with defensive stuff, but that would be my approach.
Thank you. I like the idea of making the kids collaborators and the rules, because that had not occurred to me, and that's a really good idea.
Fantastic. Will you keep me posted about how it goes?
Sure. Good.
Well, listen, fantastic congratulations and massive kudos on your parenting.
Like, seriously, this is really, really great stuff.
And your kids are very lucky to have such a concerned and caring parent to look for these kinds of alternatives.
So, like, fantastic for you.
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