What is It to Discipline a Child: What Should It Be? A Reanalysis of Time-out from the Perspective of Child Mental Health, Attachment, and Trauma

Parental discipline strategies are a necessary and critical aspect of positive child development. Their qualities confer risk versus protection for the development of mental health problems. Time-out from positive reinforcement is now one of the most common and well-researched discipline procedures across the world, with overwhelming evidence to support its efficacy and acceptability. It has also recently attracted considerable criticism from writers evoking child well-being considerations based on attachment theory. The main concern is that the removal of a child to time-out exposes the child to a break in attachment security and, for children with trauma histories, potentially causes harm. Here, we consider what a discipline strategy should be from a mental health perspective and, utilizing the best available models of developmental mental health and psychopathology, derive five axioms for judging and guiding the worth and acceptability of any particular discipline strategy. We then use these axioms to evaluate and specify how time-out can be used in a way that maximizes positive child outcomes, and then review its use with children who have experienced complex trauma. We show that time-out, when conceptualized and enacted consistently with contemporary models of learning, attachment, self-regulation, and family systems theory, is actually a positive perturbation to these systems that can rapidly remediate problems the child is experiencing, and thereby generally enhances child well-being. Clinical, research, and policy implications are briefly discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).