Page 74 - The Intentional Parent

when I get the ticket and when I pay the fine, I slow it down and obey the speed laws.
Unreasonable consequences do little more than allow you to vent your spleen when your kids are misbehaving, and if you can’t follow through your children will ultimately scoff at your hollow threats. “You won’t go out for a year, after what you have done,” is a tough threat to follow through on, and in the end might make you more miserable than it will make your child attentive to their behavior. Much better to link your consequence to something about to happen in the near future.
Time Out
The term “time out” is a term most parents are familiar with but the practice of giving a time out is poorly understood and therefore poorly utilized. Time out is a consequence, which parents often mistake for a short stay in “home jail.”
Time out is a term derived from behavioral psychology but lots of my colleagues even forget that the term is a shortened version of the term “time out from reinforcement,” which means that one aspect of time out which motivates different behavior is the association of having been taken out of an environment that is reinforcing. Bottom line is that if your child is being removed from an environment that is chaotic and poorly structured in the first place time out is unlikely to have any direct positive effect on behavior. Your child might actually seek negative attention and a time out to go to a place where he has more control. Returning to the chaotic environment then only produces more bad behavior.
The Intentional Parent by Peter J. Favaro, Ph.D. 74