timeouts

Now that Brody is at the age where he is starting to understand right from wrong, parenting life has all of a sudden become a whole lot harder. He likes to push the limits. For example, if I tell him not to touch the TV, he will look me in the eye, and touch the screen as gently as he can with one little chubby finger. Another example is if I tell him to not hit, he will softly tap the thing or person he had decided to hit with a big smile on his face like he wants me to know that it is "nice hitting", not "real hitting". He is like this in many different scenarios, and let me tell you, it can drive me crazy at times.

Right now a speech pathologist comes to our house every other week to work with Brody. He is still not talking, so when I took him in for his 18 month check up, the doctor thought that it would be beneficial for him to be a part of this program.We'll see if it helps... it's been three months and we haven't seen much progress in the speech department.

The program believes that working on daily struggles with the child (such as hitting, screaming, throwing food, etc) in certain ways will help him in his speech development at the same time. She suggested that we try putting Brody in timeout. Before she visited at house, I hadn't thought much of trying timeouts with Brody because he seemed like he was too young and couldn't understand consequences yet. However she thought it was a good idea, and hey, who am I to question the expert?

So for the two weeks following that meeting that she had suggested timeouts, I was a strict "timeout giver". If he started to scream, hit me, or disobeyed, away he went to his room. It was awful! As time went on I felt as though life at home was just horrible. Brody never wanted to come to me. He didn't want to play with me anymore. He was overall more angry all of the time, which led to more screaming, more hitting, and more disobeying.

I noticed a change in myself as well. I felt myself becoming obsessed with punishment. If he did anything wrong, I immediately jumped up to correct him. I was starting to ignore the times when he simply just needed a hug. I began to not care. The fact that he was disobeying me and needed correction became more important than anything else that may be going on in that moment. 

Not only with Brody, but problems started to arise even with my relationship with Jeff. I started to blame anything that Brody did wrong on Jeff. If he was screaming at Jeff, I would immediately start to nag him with a phrase that sounded like, "Well its because YOU did ______ and are not doing ____." This made Jeff become defensive and everything would get worse and worse as the night continued.

Eventually though, a thought came to me that said, "What are you doing Karli? You are this little boy's mom. He needs a mom who loves him. He needs the person that is around him all the time to not be an angry person all the time."

Don't get me wrong, I don't think that there was any amount of time that I didn't love Brody, but my approach to parenting had gone in the wrong direction.

After this realization, I decided that timeouts were not helping. They were not only making Brody mad all of the time, me mad all of the time, and Jeff mad all of the time, but they were making our whole home life just... horrible. I can honestly say that after getting rid of the timeout technique, life has became extremely less stressful.

I will never know if this is because things had to become bad, and Brody had to experience a bad consequence to make him act better. I also will never know if maybe just my change of heart and perspective that came from giving all of those timeouts made things better. So maybe, after all, the timeouts had done some good. All I do know though, is after taking them away and focusing on love has made all of the difference in our house.

Another thing I realized through this experience is that one area I was lacking is to give Brody his individual attention. I caught myself getting so wrapped up in Bonnie's schedule, in my office job work, and in keeping the house in order that I was forgetting about the part of my day that I just sit on the floor and play with Brody's cars with him, or when I take him in my lap and read him a story.

I've since fixed these parts of my day and Brody is a much happier and content little toddler. Gosh, I love him so much.

The last thing that I'd like to mention about these timeouts is the sad feeling I'd get as I started to believe that Brody truly hated me. This sounds so sad, and honestly, it is so sad. He literally didn't want anything to do with me. He would choose anyone, or anything, over his momma. And while I kept telling myself that this was all worth it, and that being a parent was just hard so this was just part of it, I kept not truly believing these things.

We are now slowly fixing the friendship we once had. I know that I can't always be my kids best friend, but I know that I do want them to love me. In order for this to happen I know that I need to show them that I love them just as much. Now each time he decides to hit, we turn the situation into a time to hug it out, and end with a little kiss. I try to explain and show him how hitting makes me feel and how it is a sad thing to do. I'm relieved to say that the hitting has decreased dramatically since those dreadful timeout days.

I don't think that timeouts are a bad thing. I think that they can still serve their purpose. I predict that someday they will serve their purpose for us, just not today. I don't think Brody is ready, and may not be for awhile.

Gosh, parenting is hard. When you think you have found the solution for something... guess again, things change and you are back to ground zero. The only thing that gets me through this frustration is remembering that there always can be something to learn from each of these trials and errors.