Yep, you nailed it. If you can’t get them to stay (though by 18 months, he should be as trainable as a German Shepherd, so give it a little time) then you (safely, fleetingly) remove yourself from his sight. Good instincts!
But I WANNA clean my apartment! I WANNA I WANNA I WANNA!
Knock yourself out. I’ll be back in a couple of hours.
For The Nephews, there is no lack of attention involved in “time outs”, because their parents are incapable of Shutting The Hell Up. If the child has commited an infraction, they have to give their speech*. But both kids hate having to be still almost as much as they hate having to listen to their parents’ rantings.
- The Kidlet is already developing what my mother calls “that same look you used to have”, where you is me. As I’ve explained, it’s the look that means “I know I’m going to get the book thrown at me no matter what I do so I’ve tried to develop a poker face - but mine is naturally made of glass, I just can’t go beyond ‘glassy attention’”.
For us, “time out” means “get out of my sight before I do something we’ll both regret, especially you.” The kid doesn’t need much more of an incentive.
Yeah, but then they get drool all over the belt of your bathrobe.
I’ve been giving time outs a lot of thought recently, because it seems they’re already becoming a bit less effective for us, and my kid’s only 2 and 1/2. I’ve heard many people recommend the book “How to Talk So Kids Will Listen & Listen So Kids Will Talk”, and they had a lot of good ideas. Like WhyNot, I’m all about “natural consequences,” so I liked their approach. However, I was a little dubious at first of the fact that they advocate not using punishment at all. And they count time outs as a punishment. The idea is that using arbitrary punishments is not really instructive to the kid. At worst, it makes them resentful, and sometimes, as Pyper points out, it actually reinforces the bad behavior. At best, it teaches them that doing a specific thing will get them punished. But it doesn’t teach them how to consider the consequences of their actions in a more general sense, and it doesn’t teach them what they should do, only what they shouldn’t. They make the point that our goal should be to teach our kids to identify what’s the right thing to do, and if they mess up, to fix it. Punishment only teaches them to identify what will make their parents angry, and to avoid getting caught doing it. So I’ve come to the conclusion that timeouts can still work, but ideally, they should only be used when they’re a natural consequence of the bad behavior. “If you can’t share your toys, then you can’t play at all for five minutes,” makes sense to a kid. “If you keep throwing food on the floor, then you’ll have to sit quietly for five minutes,” makes considerably less sense. Since reading the book, I’ve tried to use consequences rather than always resorting to time outs, and that does seem to make the time outs more effective.
As for the original question, how to make them stay put, we started out by holding him in place, as DSeid described. This was relatively easy, since we started when the kid was around a year old, maybe a year and a half. I’d sit with him on my lap, facing out, and I’d quietly count to 60 (we do one minute per year of life). As he got a little older and caught on to the concept, I started having him sit on the stairs while I sit in front of him and count. It sounds like I’m paying attention to him, but I don’t look at him directly, and I ignore him unless he talks or wiggles around or tries to get up. If he does that, I threaten to put one of his stuffed animal in time out as well. That usually does the trick. He’ll cry, but he’ll sit still for the duration. For some reason, he really hates having his buddies in time out, even if it just means the buddy is sitting on the floor next to me. I got that idea from Frylock, incidentally, and will be forever grateful. Now, I just need to threaten a time out, and that’s usually sufficient to stop the behavior.