I definitely think that locking a child in their room is a punishment and not a discipline. It’s definitely not teaching a child anything and it isn’t doing anything to promote the relationship with the person doing the punishing.
Give us an example of what your child does that makes you feel like he warrants this punishment.
How old is he?
What have you tried as alternative behavior management techniques?
To be honest, there is no discipline in that house. The dad yells at the kid to go to his room and when the kid walks out a few minutes later, the dad says nothing. And if the dad does try to enforce punishment, the mom just negates him by giving in to the kid anyway and yelling at the dad. I suspect that if they enforced ANY punishment just a few times, their 5-year old would not still be acting like a 2-year old.
I strongly disagree. One of the things kids need to learn to do is reflect on their behavior. We live in a world of over-stimulation, and when a kid gets super-wound up, removing them from company and putting them in a quiet, calm enviroment to think instead of just acting/reacting can be very useful and break non-productive patterns. I do think the room they are sent to needs to be condusive to reflection (no Wii) and there must be a debriefing afterward where parent and child go over what happened and why it happened and why it was a problem–but in and of itself removing a child from a given enviroment can be productive.
Changing the subject, for teens removing the door entirely is often more effective than locking it.
One guy I know has a daughter who broke the rules (can’t remember what). The mom decided the punishment would be that the daughter picked out a weeks worth of school clothes and than had the dad seal the closet off with boards. So for a month the girl couldn’t wear anything nice, which was apparently excrutiating.
I agree that the kid always has to know that the punishment is due to their own actions. You have to establish the cause and effect relationship and the concept that certain behavior is not acceptable.
Yeah, I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that they have discipline problems in that household that a bedroom door lock is not going to fix.
Manda JO, I agree with you that removing a child from a given environment can be productive. I’m just not sure that locking them in their bedroom is the way to do it.
The debriefing that you mentioned is crucial and a very good point.
Ditto. My son could climb out of his crib at around 14 months. I locked his room at night for a while, because there’s no way I could sleep if I knew he could wander around the house. He could climb over the LR couch, I could just picture him up on the kitchen counters, turning on the stove. He even knew how to open the front door – I had to put a bolt on it way up high so he wouldn’t run out into the street when I wasn’t looking.
Hardly going out on a limb on that one. If they had the gumption to get and use the lock, they’d probably have the problem fixed through regular means. But I was still surprised at his insistence that the locked room was abusive.
Another vote for self-restraint being part of the punishment, and for locked doors being a hazard.
But “abuse”? No. No. Not even close.
Ask Randall Piercy what he thinks of this idea now. The link is to a blog entry detailing his criminal/felony prosecution, read the comments too.
Adding, a reason for not locking a child into a room is if there is a fire (or other emergency) it is harder to get them out of the house safely… Just a thought.
I’ve avoided sending my 3.5-yr-olds to their rooms as punishment because I didn’t want them to view bedtime as punishment, too, and resist it. But there have been a few times when a hysterical child has been sent to bed to calm down, which generally takes 10 minutes or so. Closing the door has been sufficient. Hmmm, I might’ve stood there and held it once while practicing deep breathing (sometimes Mommy needs a timeout).
There’s a good chance that if I locked mine in their rooms I’d forget they were there. It’s been known to happen while playing hide-n-seek.
Plus what if they had to pee and I was several rooms away? At that point it’s very cruel.
But I did notice when we bought this house that someone had patched spots outside each door where locks must have been. I think the previous owners had 4 kids.
As has been said, I do not think it is abuse, but I think there is simply no point in locking up a child (unless you need the time out yourself!). It is exactly like training a dog, you can drag him on a leash for hours and the dog is not learning to walk besides you.
My kids are 2 and 3, and when I say “go to your room” they cry all the way there, by themselves, and sit on the edge of their bed until I say so (or lie crying in the most desperate of cases). It took a ton of patience at first, but they eventually got it that trying to get out before I said so was not good for them.
If they lock that kid in their room, I am willing to bet he will be kicking that door for as long as they leave him there. Eventually the parents will get tired of the noise and will let him out, teaching the kid that being loud is the way to get their parents to break. Not exactly what was intended, I am sure.
I think that leaving a kid in a locked room for an hour as punishment is a fairly bad idea. Who knows what kind of trouble an angry kid could do once he realizes that he is locked in and can not escape. I would be concerned about property damage or self harm, either on purpose or accidental.
I can think of two cases off of the top of my head in which parents had their children removed by the state that involved locking kids in rooms. It was not the reason that they had their children removed, but it was mentioned in the court documents to beef up their argument that the children should be removed. One locked thier daughter in her room during dinner time if she refused to eat what they thought was a fully nutritious meal (ex: she would eat the roast and the potatoes, but refuse to eat the green beans). She would end up urinating in Snapple bottles while the rest of her family finished their meal. Another young man would get locked up when his family thought he was being too hyper and loud. He eventually set the bathroom on fire as revenge (no one was home).
I think that it is perfectly acceptable to remove a child from others if they are misbehaving. Locking them in is going too far. A better idea would be to either warn them that they will be punished further if they leave their room (as others have mentioned), or sit next to their room if you think that they need that level of supervision.
Mesquite-oh well said! Did you read the Randall Piercy case I linked? Horrible! 
Actually this very option was suggested to us by the family therapists we’ve worked with for many years, in Moon Unit’s case. Our daughter is bright, and has a very volatile temper, and when she gets in “that” state, she becomes utterly unreachable. We had to send her to her room to give her time to cool down (sometimes an hour or more before she could be reasoned with) as nothing else worked.
For a number of years, sending her to her room meant sending her and either standing there holding the door shut, or listening to her opening the door and screaming invective at us, or listening to her slamming the door repeatedly. That’s when she wasn’t amusing herself by destroying her possessions, gouging the drywall, and (once) breaking the window.
The therapists suggested that a lock on the outside of the door was an alternative to the holding/slamming/letting her open it. So we switched the doorknob around - it’s one of those standard ones where you can twist the insert, and it can be opened from the other side with a strip of metal through a hole in the knob.
All in all, we’ve used it perhaps a half dozen times and not in several years. In every case, we were within 30 feet of the room the whole time so the safety issues were not a concern. Did we like doing this? Oh hell no. Would we have, say, gone to a place not within earshot? nope - too risky. Oh, and of course it didn’t have much effect on the destruction inside the room anyway.
One other time - when she had had a massive meltdown one day and persisted the next - we actually went one better and removed the door. I think she was doorless for something like a week. She earned that door back through good behavior.
Mama Zappa, worse than Katie Kaboom? :eek:
Zabali_Clawbane, thank you for that link! I have never heard of Katie Kaboom.
Is there a way to save that clip from YouTube? I teach a class on Therapeutic Crisis Intervention and it would be great clip to show (more for the fun of it than anything else.)
I’m still curious on the age of the child in question.
Hypno-Toad, I think I’ve just realized that we aren’t talking about something you have done w/ your child…but, just a recommendation of something for your friend to try.
For some reason I was thinking that both of you had kids and you were recommending it to him because it worked for you.
I was sent to my room as a kid and I did the same with my kids. I see no issue with it but a lock seems excessive.
My kids never had all the extra in their room other than regular toys and I was to poor to afford a TV per bedroom. The TV, VCR and the computer were all in the livingroom so being sent to their room was not a punishment they enjoyed.
If they would have had those things I would have instructed them to keep them off. If they didn’t then I would have removed them.
Maybe a punishment by removing any extras one by one everytime they try to open the door and leave before the required punishment time and they remain gone for 24 hours.
Open the door, video game, gone. Open it again, TV, gone etc.
I remember once my parents caught my brother and I stealing money from her purse. To this day I don’t even remember being involved but my mom said I was.
They removed everything from our rooms*. The only thing left was a bed and our dresser and we had to stay in our rooms for 24 hours. Breakfast and lunch were bread and water, dinner was a regular meal.
They were trying to teach us what jail was like and the kind of punishment you get for stealing.
There was no lock on either of our doors. We didn’t dare open them or attempt to leave other than to the bathroom.
A lttle harsh maybe but I never even thought of stealing from my parents or anyone else for that matter.
With all the modern toys kids have now they look at them as a norm instead of a privilege.
*They missed an item in my room. A black rubber Barbie boot. Have a six year old entertain herself for 24 hours with nothing other than that and then come back and tell me you have tried everything as punishment.
I had an aquaintance with a very disabled daughter. Sonia went to sleep every night at 4 or 5am after wandering the house, banging on her parents’ door generally making a lot of noise. Her mother was particularly anti putting a lock on Sonia’s door and endured the nightly torment until Sonia was sixteen. Then with much guilt, she put a lock on Sonia’s door. Sonia banged on the wall between her bedroom and her parents’ room a few times but when she worked out banging = no attention, she went to sleep. At a reasonable hour! That was all it took for the sleep pattern to change and create a much happier home life. Even though it was a different situation from that of the OP’s, I thought it worth a mention. People can be rigid about what’s right and wrong and ignore the obvious.