07/19/2022
Time-outs are one of the most utilized disciplinary techniques and are often used with younger children. Our prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that is responsible for perspective, empathy, problem solving) lights up significantly around the age of 7- so often we have children sitting in a time-out who don't yet have the capacity to reflect deeply on the situation that put them there in the first place. They will sit for 5 minutes and say what needs to be said in order to exit from the time-out....but the reality is that no real learning has occured, and that there is a high probability that the child's frustration has increased (but is now bottled up).
Dr. Dan Siegel
